A “distributed denial of service attack” bombarded realtor.com and other websites operated by Move Inc. with “massive amounts of traffic,” causing the extended outages experienced Wednesday, Move said in a statement.
Realtor.com, the official real estate search portal of the National Association of Realtors, and topproducer.com, the website of Move’s popular customer relationship management system for agents, were accessible at times this morning. But the realtor.com mobile app, and apartment and new-home search site move.com, wouldn’t load for Inman News.
Some Move-owned sites, including Doorsteps, FiveStreet and TigerLead, appear to be up and running.
Distributed denial of service attacks sent by people or botnets are a growing problem for online businesses, Move said. Botnets are a collection of programs communicating with other similar programs.
Forbes reports that distributed denial of service attacks rose sharply in 2013, and have continued to grow in recent months. Security experts say they are often a diversionary tactic employed by thieves seeking credit card numbers or other sensitive data.
Move said it had no evidence that the attack “includes or has resulted in any compromise of data or other content on its websites,” and that it’s “working closely with federal law enforcement to identify the persons responsible for the attack,” which it said began midday Tuesday.
Wednesday’s outages made realtor.com, topproducer.com and move.com unusable for much of the day, frustrating agents. Some said the outages hindered their ability to communicate with clients and perform daily tasks.