UK-based consumer finance website MoneySavingExpert.com has been forced to pull most of its services as a result of an ongoing denial of service attack.
The attack has left a guide to reclaiming mis-sold Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) temporarily unavailable. Martin Lewis, who runs the site, said the mis-selling of PPI to people applying for personal loans and credit cards is rife. He recently started a campaign to reclaim the cost of loan and card insurance.
MoneySavingExpert.com - a self-billed "consumer revenge" site - claims it is used by over three million people in the UK a month. The assault on the site by unknown assailants follows the recent launch of Lewis's PPI reclaim campaign, something the site reckons is "probably not a coincidence".
Of course, the very idea that banks and credit card companies are behind the assault is preposterous - they can barely fight off such attacks themselves.
A notice on the front page of the site late on Monday morning explained the situation and appeals to the better nature of the attackers. Around midday UK time, even the front page became unavailable, possibly as a result of an intensification of the assault.
Denial of service attacks involve rendering websites unusable, sometimes for prolonged periods that can reach into days. Attackers commonly start off with cruder forms of attack (such as a SYN Flood) before increasing the sophistication of the attack to confuse and confound a site's defenders.
However clever or sophisticated the attack might be, it's probably done little beyond temporarily delaying some PPI claims. The assault might even draw wider attention to the issue.
MoneySavingExpert.com's PPI reclaiming guide and free template letters are due to be included in its weekly MoneySaving email, or via Google's cache
here, pending full restoration of the site.
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