Whether a coincidence or not, after reporting which was critical against multiple National Association of Mortgage Field Services (NAMFS) members including Alpine Companies, Guardian Asset Management, Innotion Enterprises, and Verisk, the International Association of Field Service Technicians (IAFST) website was struck with a prolonged Structured Query Language (SQL) injection (SQLi) attack. The Layer 7 SQLi Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack began last night and only hours after releasing an article which brought into question NAMFS Executive Director Eric Miller’s recent “partnership” with former REOMAC, National Association of Default Professionals (NADP). While the autopsy of the event continues, the nearly hour long attack was successfully mitigated with zero operational downtime.
In almost every developed country and state, even attempting to exploit a WordPress site you do not own is illegal. The penalties can be quite severe and even lead to imprisonment in some cases!
The IAFST was recently admitted into Google’s Project Shield. Project Shield is a free service that defends news, human rights and election monitoring sites from DDoS attacks. This, in combination with Two Step Authentication ensured that the IAFST remained available for both staff and its Membership. We will be releasing specific data later this week and strongly suggest that labor-centric organizations fighting against unfair labor tactics and antitrust issues in their environment apply for the program!
Whether or not this marks an escalation in the already tense relationship between Labor and Management remains to be seen. As this was the first time in the seven year history of the IAFST that this type and magnitude of attack has ever occurred, we are advised that all options are on the table.
