DHH is reporting that criminals are bringing down the Basecamp network of sites in a blackmail attempt. A working writeup is on a gist from DHH right here: https://gist.github.com/dhh/9741477

DDOS is now part of the weather of the Internet. Take it into account or suffer the consequences.

When high-profile sites got attacked by Anonymous, the rest of us could laugh and blame those orgs for bringing down the wrath upon themselves.

But the truth is that those were noteworthy exceptions to the norm, which is that DDOS attacks happen frequently and for no discernible reason.

We would laugh today at a major site that allowed itself to be taken down by a SQL injection. Time to start thinking the same way about DDOS.

My concern is when these extortionists realize it is probably going to be far more effective to DDOS lots of smaller less sophisticated businesses than the larger more resilient and competent ones.

Targeting hundreds of small-medium sized business websites and automate e-mails asking for $1000 to get back online.

I see it playing out a lot like phishing scams.

While I tend to agree, 1000's of un-tech savvy people complaining to lawmakers/authorities about this might have more of an effect than one well funded corporation.

I actually cringed reading that back to myself (due to structure of US politics) but I can only hope their voices would be heard.

If we say DDOS's are like hurricanes than yes most would assume that major" institutions would be able to survive. However I doubt anyone would assume your average mom and pop would be able to (excuse the pun) "weather" the storm of a DDOS.

Your average mom and pop a shop probably uses shared hosting though. You can't really extort them you'd have to extort godaddy or whomever.

Whoever is doing this thank you for reminding me how important Basecamp is to my business. I hope you are hunted down.

I'm curious (as a non Basecamp user) does BS offer a data export option? Let's say they have an extended outage, would it be possible to construct a workable backup based on your backup file (if one exists?)

You can export your data but in their notification when the backup is ready to download, they'll say "You can't import it back into Basecamp, it's just for reference."