Joe Wilson’s Payments Provider Reports DDoS Attack

The Austin-based online payments startup Piryx reports that it was targeted in a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack yesterday due to its hosting of a fundraising campaign for Joe Wilson – the politican who made headlines this week after shouting “You Lie!” during Obama’s health care reform speech.

Piryx, a non-partisan site that hopes to build out a platform for political fundraising, says the DDoS attack began at 3:12pm CST Friday and was finally brought under control at 1:45am CST Saturday.

The company writes via email:

Yesterday (Friday) around 3:12pm CST we noticed the bandwidth spike on the downstream connections to Piryx.com server collocation facility. Our bandwidth and packet rate threshold monitors went off and we saw both traditional DOS bandwidth based attacks as well as very high packet rate, low bandwidth ICMP floods all destined for our IP address.
…At this point we have spent 40+ man hours, with 10 external techs fully monopolized in researching and mitigating this attack.
To give a sense of scale, the attacks were sending us 500+ Mbps of traffic, which would run about $147,500 per month in bandwidth overages.