Move Inc. Operation Held for Ransom

This past weekend the Colorado Association of REALTORS® received news that Move, Inc. is the target of a person or group of people that is illegally generating massive amounts of Internet traffic and pointing it at their sites, including realtor.com and other Move corporate sites.  This amount of traffic makes their service unavailable to legitimate consumers and customers.  Move and law enforcement are working to determine the origin and who is responsible for the attack.  Move, Inc. received a ransom demand but has not responded.

Below is the open letter CAR received from Move, Inc.

An Open Letter to the Real Estate Industry About Move’s Distributed Denial of Service Attack 

Industry colleagues, consumers, and customers,

I am writing to make you aware that Move, Inc. is the target of an ongoing malicious distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This means that a person or group of people is illegally generating massive amounts of Internet traffic and pointing it at our sites, including realtor.com®, Top Producer® and other Move corporate sites.

The amount of traffic makes our services unavailable to legitimate consumers and customers. Like other technology companies, Move has defended itself from DDoS attacks in past, however the scale of this week’s attack is large enough to impact the company’s network service providers. Other major online portals received similar attacks in recent months. We have spoken with some of these companies to learn from their recent experience.

Attacks of this kind typically do not result in data loss or security breach, and we do not believe that this attack jeopardizes any data or its security on any of our websites.

Appropriate law enforcement is working to determine the attack’s origin. In connection with the attack, Move received a ransom demand, which it did not respond to. DDoS attacks on Internet-based businesses and associated ransom demands are unfortunately becoming more common.

Feel confident that Move’s technical team is working around-the-clock with the Prolexic division of Akamai Technologies, Inc., Internet security experts, and its network service providers to resolve the problem and help prevent future attacks. Our focus is to restore operations as quickly and securely as possible to provide consumers access to residential listings and to support our real estate industry customers.

Because the design of the attack is to overwhelm a system with traffic, even the redundant aspects of our systems are impacted. Move is working to migrate all its systems to a different network architecture to increase their protection. We operate a large suite of websites so its migration plan is complex and will take several days, which is typical for companies under a DDoS attack of this strength.

In addition to hearing from me, you might also hear from other leaders of our businesses. We will provide status updates on our Facebook pages. For realtor.com, visit http://ht.ly/yehzs and for Top Producer, visit http://ht.ly/yehWQ.

Fighting the good fight,
Steve Berkowitz
CEO, Move, Inc.