With over 20 of my clients using PayMate to accept credit card payments, the recent unavailability of this service had many worried. At time of posting, the service is back up although their website (http://www.paymate.co.nz/) wasn't, although http://www.paymate.com/ was. This is what happened:
Online payment service Paymate is down due to a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. The company's Vice President of Sales and Marketing Greg Quinn told AuctionBytes the site has been down since early yesterday morning, and at no time during the disruption has any user data or information of any kind been at risk.
Paymate is an accepted payment method on eBay, and the company said it was working diligently with eBay and its customer service teams to provide updates and ensure proper information was being delivered.
DDoS attacks are not uncommon. Last August, Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal were victims of Distributed Denial of Service attacks (see this report from Mashable). Over the years, other sites in the industry have experienced such attacks, including Atomic Mall, ePier, Andale and ChannelAdvisor.
In a statement today, Paymate said it was unclear who launched this week's attack against it and what their motives might have been. According to the statement, "The company expects the DOS issue will be resolved quickly and that it will soon be back to providing its customers the fast, safe, and reliable experience they've come to expect from Paymate."
Paymate is keeping users updated through posts on its Twitter account.
For more information on Denial of Service attacks, see the following resources.
Understanding Denial-of-Service Attacks from US-CERT - link
Wikipedia entry on Denial-of-service attack - link
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