Denial of Service

[Elessar]

As many of you have noticed, we have had some spotty service outages. I contacted HostMonster.com support and wanted to let you all know what I got back from them:

Hello,

Currently we're in the final phase of solving the DDOS attack that afflicted your server. We are moving you back to the Shared IP address. The propagation time can take up to 5 hours. This will finally resolve the DDOS attack and your site will be fully restored.

If you'd like to learn more about this kind of terrorist attack, check

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

And, of course, thank you for contacting support.

Brent L.
Support Level 1

Just for curiosity's sake, this doesn't mean we specifically were targeted with this DDOS attack, it was likely hundreds of domains perhaps across several server boxes. In Dark_rain's specific words, "I dont think we were the intended target, just a bystander caught in the blast."

Things should clear up over the next few hours as they have been fixing it all day.

[evcake]

What a slimy thing to do. Some people have waaaay too much time on their hands.

[mjimeyg]

Still... for a company with what is clearly a ton of customers and therefore money... they don't seem to have grasped the concept of redundancy. As an IT professional it makes me cringe!

[Alelou]

From what I've read in the past, some of these attacks amount to extortion -- i.e. they'll try to get money from a company in exchange for NOT bringing them down. Or, they'll purposely attack in retaliation because they were prevented from achieving some nefarious criminal scheme with spam and bots or whatever that they had their hearts set on. They know they can drive a company out of business if they keep attacking.

[dark_rain]

Still... for a company with what is clearly a ton of customers and therefore money... they don't seem to have grasped the concept of redundancy. As an IT professional it makes me cringe!

Well I wouldn't quite say that. From the looks of the reply we were on a temporary server. Not a great method of dealing with attacks but I guess its better than being down for 3 or 4 days straight. Other than that I'd have to agree, not having backup plans in the event of system damage/failure/attack is a criminal oversight and I've seen it cost dearly.

[Aquarius]

We lost over six months worth of posts at my Star Wars forum, because of a similar attack on ezBoards (now Yuku). It wasn't just us, HUNDREDS of forums were affected because a bunch of servers were taken out.