Thanks for the information! I've been vainly clicking around for news.

If you find out anything else please let us know, as even the Hosting Matters forums seem to be down.

Ah. I thought it was related to the signal problems I'm having with my cable. Thanks for posting this.

Thanks! At least now I know that's what is happening. I'm a little surprised they're as vulnerable as that, but then if it's a convincing enough attack, all bets are off.

It's really pissing me off not to be able to get to my site.

Oh, and (duh)--I should have read your post more carefully before commenting. Nice to know there is an alternative forum set up.

OK, I'll just spend the time while my site is down thinking of what I'd do to those hackers if I caught them.

Believe me, Beth, we're right there with you.

Emperor Misha, Rachel Lucas, Gut Rumbles, Bill Whittle and on and on.

Not much damn good at being conspirators if they're all on the same servers! We should make them turn in their VRWC memberships cards.

I knew you'd have the scoop, Dean. Thanks.

Thanks, Dean. Being one of the (apparently few) Lefties over at Hosting Matters, I know to come here when things go (rarely) kerflooey.

Sounds like these peckerwads really did a number - apparently all of their servers are down.

Whatever the case...not nice. Which gets me to wondering about the merits of a Do Not Hack or EMail/Comment Spam Me national list. I wouldn't mind taking in a few grand each and every time some cretin pulls this sort of nonsense. Fact is, episodes like this one piss me off far more than any Telemarketer During the Dinner Hour ever has.

L

Every network is vulnerable to something like this - one of our remote servers is at a network with several GIG-Es and endured significant DDOS attacks over the course of almost two weeks, making things rather interesting.

Fortunately for us, we're not generally the recipient of this sort of...gift. Unfortunately, this time it was our turn, and the site we suspect is the actual target of the attack (commenting on/reporting on Middle East issues) is going to have to be moved to an alternate network to relieve our main network from this sort of activity.

And Lisa, take heart - we host all sorts of sites, for clients of all races, creeds, sexes, political persuasions, and so on. Everyone is feeling the pain of the actions of the scumbags responsible for tonight's problems.

Update: The attack was directed at one site in particular. No name released yet but a HM rep tells me "it appears to be a pro-Israeli site, commenting on and reporting on activities in the middle east." No, it's not LGF.

Lovely.

I guess this is what amounts to civil discourse among the hacking elite. Apparently, they couldn't manage the brainpower involved with pulling together a free Blogger oppositional site. Reminds me of the assholes who took down al-Jazeera's English site some months back.

Freedom of speech. You gotta love it. Especially when people don't care for what you say. The "right" does not equate to vandalism. I hope this latest one is caught and his nuts turned tightly. Sexist? Women don't pull this garbage. We far prefer the art of argument.

Do you get the impression I'm suffering from blog withdrawal?

Like I said...peckerwads.

L

I first noticed it when my WarBlog Central update job was hanging up on about half the sites on my list. I just moved to a new hosting company (not Hosting Matters), and I was changing the WBC job's ftp parms to the new site. I recognized the sites as HM-hosted sites, but I didn't realize it was the result of a deliberate attack until I posted on it and a reader left a comment.

Totally agree that the bastards responsible should get some serious punishment for this.

Riyadh delenda est!

We're another "lefty" over at Hosting Matters. They've been great to us. Being down five hours gave us time to read our blogroll from top to botoom. But we're glad to be back up.

I'm nobody special, but I still love Hosting Matters. Why? Because of people like Annette.

Thanks for the info, Dean.

D0s Attacks are simply not preventable, if the hacker is good they really cannot be traced either. The hacker would need to use the same bots over and over again in order to trace it bach to the zombi bot command post. The flooding packets typically come from hundreds of hijacked computers and the control channel is typically an IRC channel that can be abandoned at any time. The hosting company could filter the offending packets but they can't do it forever. The routers still have to say "no" and that takes up a lot of processing. Big players will have mirror sites set up but that is too expensive for individuals.

The net is just simply venerable to this type of attack period and there is nothing that can really be done except ride out the storm.

Thank God my supply of online midget porn was not interrupted.

I'm just a few months into my relationship with Hosting Matters and I was way impressed with their updates while things were down.

Actually, Rick, that's not always the case.

Go over to www.grc.com, and see how Gibson dealt with a DOS attacker. Pretty kewl reading, I must say...

First it was the jerks who ruined CB. The nastiness and the language got so foul that I quit trying to use it on my long trips on the road. Now it's Spam and Hackers.

I spent half an hour today cleaning out the Spam, and the same yesterday. I'd recommend a testicular-noose for the first three months punishment for Hackers as a beginning, and go on from there with more imaginative devices.