The Stovebolt Site Forums The Back Office IT Short Bus Stovebolt outages

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.

UPDATE: After making a number of adjustments to the server and blocking two more networks, the server appears to be working normally. No idea how long this will last. Someone appearently has decided to attack us for reasons unknown.

2nd UPDATE: I had to block yet another network this morning. This is getting ridiculous.

We are glad you are willing to do this for all the Stovebolt world. It's like weeds in a garden - get them out when they first appear. And we have such a nice garden.

Thanks for keeping the meanies off of us bald eagle.

-Woog