Ancestry.com has been incapacitated by a massive DDoS attack

The genealogy website Ancestry.com is working to fully restore its service after it was hit by a Distributed Denial of Service attack. Company spokeswoman Heather Erickson says it means ancestry.com was overwhelmed with bogus traffic Monday. “The attack was overloading our systems with massive amounts of traffic, but it did not access any data in servers,” Erickson said. The site, which has more than 2 million subscribers, was down for much of Tuesday and wasn’t fully operational Wednesday afternoon. Its Web team neutralized the DDoS attack and was working to fully restore services. “This has been a very frustrating and overwhelming experience, and our teams have been fantastic, working around the clock to make it neutralized,” Erickson said. Company officials are hoping to fully recover from the attack soon.

Ancestory.com was breached by a mysterious and massive DDOS attack that completely shut down the popular website for nearly 24 hours. The attack flooded Ancestry‘s servers with bogus traffic that camoflauged itself as legitimate visitors. No personal data was compromised, however. The attack hit the site at 1:30 p.m. Mountain time on Monday and was brought more or less under control by 11:00am Tuesday MT, said Ancestry spokeswoman Heather Erickson. As of Thursday, Ancestry was still digging out and trying to pinpoint where the attack originated. “I can’t speak to the specific tech issues, but we’re really fortunate because none of our data was compromised,” Erickson said. Ancestry is a popular geneaology research site, founded in 1997. It has 2.1 million subscribers. “The intent was to take us down. But given the attack and what happened, were not going into specifics of how we were breached,” Erickson said. Ancestry is working with outside organizations to assess the damage. Erickson declined to say who they were. Ancestry is lucky, unlike retailers Target and Neiman Marcus, whose sites were pulverized in late December by a highly effective attack that breached their firewalls. Hackers then ripped off PIN data while making off with 100 million users’ personal data, such as social security numbers and bank information.