FastMail a renowned web service company become the latest victim of a group of unknown hackers, who took down its services with a DDoS (denial of service) attack this week. The group is demanding extortion from the web service provider which is believed to be around of around $7,500.

This is the second DDoS attack the company has suffered with in days according to the official blog post published by the FastMail. The company suffered the first attack on Sunday followed by the second attack just 24 hours later.

In an official announcement the web service provider refuses to respond to the extortion demands of these cyber criminals, but warned its customers that they may face some disturbance in the services over the period of 7 days.

FastMail is not the first web service provider who has been targeted with a DDoS attack. In recent times we have seen some other major web service providers like; Hushmail, Zoho, RunBox and Protonmail with same kind of attacks.

The company told their customers on their official blog that they are taking all the necessary steps to stop these attacks in future.  The company also appreciated their patience of their customers and ensures them that their security teams are taking all the necessary steps to avoid such attacks in future.
 
DDoS attack takes place when an attacker with a help of multiple systems (botnets) diverts the traffic on a targeted system which causes the service to go offline. These attacks are pretty easy to organize and considered very cheap in the eyes of security researchers.