Yesterday, it became extremely difficult, if not impossible, to access the site. An investigation uncovered that the site was under attack in what is known as a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. This is an attack where a large number of computers are directed to access a website simultaneously, overwhelming the server and causing timeouts due to the inability of the server to handle the massive number of requests.

We have no idea why the attack was launched, but the result was devastating.

Recently, we configured a firewall to block hosts that were accessing our site before they can get to the web server. This was done in an effort to reduce the degradation of service that was happening periodically. Since we already had the firewall in place, we used it to block the networks that were used in the DDoS attack.

Service appears to have returned to normal, but it's entirely possible that a similar attack will happen in the future.

Paul Schmehl CI 6
geek@stovebolt.com
Stovebolt Staff: Geek