“Meetup, a popular social networking site for organizing group activities, said today that it spent the weekend fending off what it called a ‘massive attack’ on its servers that caused the site to be unavailable to many users. The attackers attempted to extort the company by email to stop the attacks in exchange for a $300 payment.
Writing on the company’s blog, CEO Scott Heiferman described how the attack began on Thursday morning with an email saying that ‘a competitor asked me to perform a DDoS attack on your website.’”