Website Outage

The recent website outage occurred because our webhosting company disconnected our server from the Internet. Their explanation was not supported by any data and I am seeking more information.

I apologize for the inconvenience.

Here's the response to my inquiry for more information:

Webhosting Company writes: Yes, your server was the target of a DDOS. You are correct in saying that there is very little that can be done for a DDOS. It is uncommon for us to have a DDOS, maybe 3 times a year some server or another falls victim within our company. Generally, the DDOS is a result of someone getting angry enough about some content on a site and they want it shut down for a laugh.

A DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service Attack) requires network expertise and resources. Whoever did this was not only angry but skilled and well resourced. Maybe some of our members with expertise in this area can comment. Members can't respond to threads in this forum (The Public Record forum), so I'll move this thread over to the Announcements forum.

Thread moved here from the The Public Record forum.

Admin writes: A DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service Attack) requires network expertise and resources. Whoever did this was not only angry but skilled and well resourced.

Although you are correct that it requires resources - it doesn't actually require their own resources.
Supposedly there is a black market for buying lists of compromised PCs.
Someone could have bought up a list and used those 'stolen' resources to DDoS this site - perhaps.

Or maybe...
DDoS is often a blanket term for a wide variety of attacks (people use that term instead of DoS) - and not all these require large amounts of resources.
(This moves out of my area of expertise but...) some attacks use system settings and server errors to use up the victim server's resources.
I don't think those kinds of attacks require more than just expertise.

Edited by Panda, : No reason given.

I apologize for the inconvenience.

A minor inconvenience. But I was wondering what happened so thanks for the explanation.

I agree with Panda's comment. There are huge botnets built out of trojanized machines, and they can probably be leased for a modest fee. So it mostly takes determination, rather than expertise, to mount a DDOS attack.

I mostly see this as someone who investigates phishing (in an amateurish way). That's another use of botnets.

On the bright side, having enemies may be an indication that we ain't dead yet.

Why was this post not visible during the actual outage?

You're getting slack, that's what it is.

I was lonely, very lonely......

I was out for a few days. How long was the site down for?

Just curious. I'd freak if EvC disappeared.

I was out for a few days. How long was the site down for?

I think it was just one day, all day Saturday the 1st.

I'll have you know, I only checked to see if it was up, like, 10 times.

Just curious. I'd freak if EvC disappeared.

I don't freak, but I'd be pretty disappointed.

And not just because of the potential discussions that I'd loose, but also because of the loss of the records of all the posts I've written over the last... awe geez... 8.5 years.

I apologize for the inconvenience.

Its no biggie.

But I do appreciate the explanation, so thanks.

I was just mentioning to Phi that losing the record of my posts would disappoint me as much if not more than losing future discussions.

I know you originally invented this software to sell at some point, and I've seen you admit that you've kinda missed the mark with the transition to tablets n'stuff.

Have you ever considered the value that some of us might place on the posts we've written here?

I don't blog or anything, but I can imagine myself in the future wishing that I could read over some of my old EvC posts, or share them with my family or something.

What kind of format are they stored in? How big are the files? Is it possible for you to mail me a flash drive with all my posts on it, or something like that? I'd be willing to pay for it.

What if it was a copy of each entire thread that I've ever participated in? Would that get too big?

Would I need special software to read the data?

Hi CS,

I'm a bit short of time right now, so let me just briefly provide a couple answers.

I value the post history as much as anyone. The database is backed up periodically.

Posts are stored in the database in HTML format. The current size of the database is about 2 GB, most of it messages. It wouldn't be too difficult to add a feature that throws the HTML for an entire thread into a file instead of a page at a time out to a browser, but I have no plans to do that at this time.

The thread index you get when you click on your name will tell you how many threads you've participated in, but it wouldn't give you an estimate of the size. Obviously it wouldn't be too big, since the total of all messages is around 2 GB. If your threads represented 1% of the total then that would be around 20 MB, a very modest size by today's standards.