It appears that our web hosting company (which is one of the largest in the country), was under attack from "malicious traffic" yesterday. That's where someone wants to take down a server by bombarding it with massive page requests. In this case we had intermittent service during part of the day yesterday. I'm sorry for any inconvenience you may have encountered as you tried to access our web store or message board. By the end of the day they had it sorted out and here's a copy of the e-mail that they sent us...


Hello,

We wanted to take a moment and provide you with the latest information on the network escalation that affected your web site. At this time all services should be restored and our hold time is back to the normal three ring wait.


Problem:

At approximately 7:45AM, a number of servers on the Newark, Delaware shared hosting network started originating 1.2M packets per second, resulting in a massive forwarding impact and intermittent latency across the Newark core. The result was massive latency across the shared network, and some latency at time on some dedicated servers.

Analysis:

The initial thought was a server compromise, but analysis revealed no evidence of servers being compromised. All indications pointed to abusive, malicious traffic directed at and originating from our shared Linux servers. Throughput during the Denial of Service Attack peaked at 1.5Mpps and has since been returned to normal levels. Our network engineering team is continuing to monitor our network for a recurrence of the attack.

Resolution:

Initially traffic was analyzed to identify a number of source IPs that were directing malicious traffic to several of our shared servers. Blocking these addresses mitigated the impact of the attack a great deal. Additional network capacity was also added by network engineering to ensure that a subsequent reinitation of the attack from new source addresses would not result in an overflow to the dedicated customer base.

Following the mitigation of the attack, our Platform Engineering group worked to identify servers that remained problematic and all available resources were devoted to restarting the appropriate services on these machines. This resolved any customer impacting issues that were not corrected by the elimination of the Denial of Service attack.

We are very sorry for any inconvenience today's issue caused you. Please feel free to contact us with any concerns or questions you may have.







Rick Gelinas

For the detailed information that can be aimed at any one of us with a web site.

I can only hope that those responsible can be hauled before the courts and receive a very substantial penalty for their deliberate actions.

In my view, complete bankruptcy of said person/s would not be too lenient.

That may act as a deterrent to others with evil intentions.

Shorty.

I've seen the light, and changed my wicked ways.
www.get.shorty.com.au

I think the Shampoo Boys are attacking.