2014-03-05: Meetup.com Suffers Extortion of Service
Level Two Attack
Meetup.com has recently been inundated with a persistent DDoS attack accompanied by a surprisingly small ($300) ransom demand. The CEO of Meetup.com has stated that they believe it is their duty to not negotiate with criminals, and that paying the ransom would effectively doom them - and other sites - to suffering greater attacks with even greater extortion demands.
No data has been accessed or stolen during the ongoing outages. The hackers have simply used the DDoS tactic to set up a blockade.
This post from Meetup goes into detail about the current state of things - it appears that the site is functioning normally, so the worst of the attack is probably over. Now it's just a matter of picking up the pieces and tallying up the cost.