23 August, 2010, Dubai: GoNabit, the first group buying website in the UAE, has confirmed it intercepted a malicious and sophisticated ‘Distributed Denial of Service Attack’ (DDoS) on Wednesday 18th August 2010.
Despite attempts to prevent legitimate users from accessing and trading on GoNabit’s website by barraging its host server with unauthorised user traffic, GoNabit’s swift action over the weekend has circumvented the criminal cyber attack and restored full access to the site in less than 92 hours.
GoNabit is a daily deal website in English and Arabic, offering consumers great deals on things to see, eat and do in Dubai and Abu Dhabi at discounts ranging between 50-90%.
GoNabit’s system engineers intercepted the attack on Wednesday afternoon and immediately notified authorities and partners. Daily deals were deactivated on its Abu Dhabi and Dubai pages while it worked with third-party solution providers to restore full service.
Dan Stuart, GoNabit’s Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder said: “I can confirm that GoNabit has been subjected to a Distributed Denial of Service attack. This is a malicious sabotage of our business and a very serious cyber crime. It is important to understand that we have not been hacked. The intended target was not our source code or customer details, but rather an attempt to inhibit our trading and damage our business.
“We deeply regret the inconvenience this incident has caused for our customers and clients, but with the help of specialists in this area, and the support and expertise of our strategic partner Bayt.com, we’ve been able to mitigate the threat of this attack in a relatively short space of time and will emerge from this incident stronger than ever. We look forward to business as usual, with new deals available on our Dubai and Abu Dhabi websites today.”