Zoho sees more cyber attacks, service disruptions over the week

The company, which faced its first attack on Nov 4, claims incoming mails from clients will not be lost

Software as a Service (SaaS) major, Zoho Corporation, has said that it has been attacked multiple times in the past few days and while the services are up and the company is mitigating the attack, it expects more attacks and more service disruptions during this week.

The company, which on Friday had said that it has been subject to cyber attacks since November 4, said that the services are up now and it is mitigating the attack. The company expect the services to keep coming through and disruptions are expected to occur again.

The company communicated that the incoming mails from its clients will not be lost. They will sit at intermediate hops and delivery will be retried for a few days, it added.

Company officials were not available for comment on the impact of the attack.

Zoho services were targeted again on November 8 and services were down for about 33 minutes, but came back up, said a company announcement. While many of the services are not reliably up yet, its teams have been working non-stop for 72 hours with various counter measures, it said.

"We are still at it and are prepared for tough days ahead. We expect more attacks and more service disruptions as we get into the work week. Please stand with us at this time," said Vijay Sundaram, Chief Strategy Officer at Zoho, in the company blog on Monday morning, almost three hours after it faced another attack.

Later in the morning, the company tweeted that it is mitigating the attack though more disruptions might yet occur. A status check on the company's services show that except three services - Zoho Mail, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show Time - the rest are operating normally at present.

Zoho was subject to a criminal attack to our networks called a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) from November 4 and attack has continued intermittently, said the company earlier.

"The obvious intent is to make Zoho and all of our services unavailable to customers by flooding our servers with bogus requests from multiple sites. The attack was accompanied by threats and a blackmail attempt at extortion to prevent ongoing attacks," it added. The attack is focused on denying access since it targets the network connections to the Zoho servers and while all the client data are sound and secure, they cannot access it reliably considering the disruptions are preventing safe access, it added.