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I'm afraid that LLJB's joke might not be far from the truth. The site went down last night at almost exactly midnight Eastern. A sense of a disturbance in The Force caused Chip to wake around 1:00 a.m. Eastern to discover a series of alarm notices on her cell phone. She tried restarting our server but without effect. She filed an emergency assistance request with the server firm and had an online chat with the overnight tech. She describes him as coming across as completely overwhelmed, using two different accounts and attempting to field questions from ten different people simultaneously.
We received, throughout the night and today, periodic status reports on the attempts to get us back online. The latest did raise the prospect that one of another of our Cold War adversaries might well be flexing their muscle:
Thank you for your patience with us getting this resolved. We have identified the problem as a large incoming DDoS [distributed denial of service] attack against our network. While we have mitigated most of the attack and are seeing services restored for some clients, the incoming flood of traffic is still causing intermittent service which you may still be seeing with your VPS [virtual private server].
This incoming attack only causes congestion on our network which is slowing down access to services. There has been no breach of security or access to any of your website files. You can expect intermittent access to your VPS until we are able to fully resolve the DDoS attack. Unfortunately we still do not have an ETA for you at this time, however we will be sure to update you as soon as we confirm a potential ETA.
There's a fascinating report out of new malware, called Spike, that's able to infect devices in "the Internet of Things" - that includes household devices like thermostats and dryers which are subject to being remotely activated or programmers - and use them as agents of DDoS attacks.
We have no way of establishing that our outage was as a result of Russian or Chinese activity, but both groups have been active of late; the Russians seem particularly irked by Western sanctions and prone to malicious disruptions.
David, the map is indeed fun and scary. My favorite, though, was the attack on the UK coming from Switzerland. Considering the number of Russians living on the (extremely) expensive shores of Lake Zurich and Lake Geneva, even that one might be the Russians.
I also thought it interesting that most of the attackers are able to hide their location so it shows the source as unknown. It must mean the ones where the source is identified must be the rookies.
I'm sure you and Chip especially have been very busy today so I hope you get some peace and quiet for the evening, and thank you for all your efforts to get things working again!!
I immediately started buying things at Amazon in an effort to help keep the light on here at MFO using the JP Morgan Chase credit card...Glad you're MFOing again!
MFO Members: If I'm not mistaken yesterday's problem stems from the web hosting service, Green Geeks, who's attitude appears to be when the problem was reported, with 200,000 web sites will get to MFO when we can. From my investigation, Green Geeks is considered a second rate web hosting service. I suggest the powers to be at MFO look for another hosting service. Regards, Ted
In this case, I was mostly unable to do anything to help get the site back online. Mostly, I filed a help ticket with Green Geeks, who were already on the case. Their response team did all the hard work, and I just relayed updates to David as I received them.
There are thousands of hosting providers and they pretty much all experience these kinds of problems. DDOS attacks, natural disasters, and hardware failures are just a few of the many things that can take a website offline. I've been quite impressed with the responsiveness of Green Geeks compared to other hosting providers that I've worked with.
Comments
Mona
We received, throughout the night and today, periodic status reports on the attempts to get us back online. The latest did raise the prospect that one of another of our Cold War adversaries might well be flexing their muscle: There's a fascinating report out of new malware, called Spike, that's able to infect devices in "the Internet of Things" - that includes household devices like thermostats and dryers which are subject to being remotely activated or programmers - and use them as agents of DDoS attacks.
We have no way of establishing that our outage was as a result of Russian or Chinese activity, but both groups have been active of late; the Russians seem particularly irked by Western sanctions and prone to malicious disruptions.
For those into neat visuals, there's a live global map of DDoS attacks that's both fun and frightening to watch.
I'll keep you as informed as I can. Regrets for the down time.
David & co.
I also thought it interesting that most of the attackers are able to hide their location so it shows the source as unknown. It must mean the ones where the source is identified must be the rookies.
I'm sure you and Chip especially have been very busy today so I hope you get some peace and quiet for the evening, and thank you for all your efforts to get things working again!!
@chip, thank you.
Regards,
Catch
Regards,
Ted
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In this case, I was mostly unable to do anything to help get the site back online. Mostly, I filed a help ticket with Green Geeks, who were already on the case. Their response team did all the hard work, and I just relayed updates to David as I received them.
There are thousands of hosting providers and they pretty much all experience these kinds of problems. DDOS attacks, natural disasters, and hardware failures are just a few of the many things that can take a website offline. I've been quite impressed with the responsiveness of Green Geeks compared to other hosting providers that I've worked with.