TransUnion Outage Said to Be Due to DDOS Attack

While TransUnion (NYSE:TRU) pursues a path of silence on the matter, yesterday’s outage is said to have been caused by a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDOS) according to an industry insider. The TransUnion site is currently live and working fine as of this report.

Yesterday, the TransUnion website along with API services utilized by many different Fintechs experienced an extended outage. Crowdfund Insider attempted to contact Transunion but the publicly traded firm remains silent on the matter.

A DDOS attack cripples a website by hitting a service with massive amounts of traffic/requests to the point the servers simply cannot keep up. These anonymous attacks are launched around the world making the dispersed nature difficult to mitigate. While services exist to counter such cyber-assaults, it is not yet clear as to how TransUnion managed the outage.

Just recently, the New Zealand Stock Exchange was the target of a similar ploy. The DDOS attack took down the exchange for multiple days. Rumors circulated that perpetrators were looking for a Bitcoin payout to halt the attack.

In the past, numerous big platforms have been the target of a DDOS attack. While digital transformation has increased our dependence on the internet to provide a plethora of must-need services, the ability to protect these services against cyber-crooks has not kept pace. This is even more important when it comes to financial services.

This past June, AWS (Amazon) reported that it was the victim of the largest DDOS attack ever with peak traffic hovering around 2.3 Tbps. The attack was said to have taken place in February.

While TransUnion has not publicly issued a statement, word on the street is that email and other services were down as well and the firm is currently working with law enforcement authorities to uncover the perps.

Crowdfund Insider has emailed TransUnion for additional information on the outage.

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