Welcome to acronym heaven. PPP today suffered a DDOS attack. In case that's a term you've never heard before, it means Distributed Denial Of Service attack. With a DDOS attack, the social malcontent responsible usually has access to a few thousand, or even tens of thousands, of computers around the world that will do their bidding. They achieve this by sending out spam email with attachments that people unwittingly open (thereby installing nasty software on their machines) and by uploading files to web servers which again people unwittingly open.

When the ne'er-do-well decides to show the world how truly powerful they are (or, more likely, when they suddenly feel the need to rebel against their actually quite rightful feelings of social inadequacy, ineptitude and general worthlessness), they run up scripts that instruct their small army of compromised machines to simultaneously make requests of a web site. The idea of the game is to take the website down by flooding it with fake traffic.

This particular social dweeb has been attacking PayPerPost since around 4 this morning with a battery of machines all making a request for the same page on the site, over and over any over, many times a second.

Our own defenses have kicked in blocking out the various IP addresses the compromised machines are using, and in some cases even blocking access to entire networks. THis is in order to keep the site up and running. The downside of course is that there are a lot of innocent casualties and as this goes on it's quite likely you may find yourself unable to access PayPerPost.

Once the attack ends (usually when the muppet simply decides to attack someone else, often because the kids parents ground them for not doing the dishes or some other household chore) we'll start to relax the firewall rules again and you should all be able to get into the system with no problem.

Unfortunately these things are now a way of life for many businesses on the Internet and there's very little that can be done about it. So, please forgive the inconvenience while we wait for this particular adolescent with a staggering inferiority complex to proclaim himself victorious to the assorted posters of N-Sync staring down at him from his bedroom walls.

Posted by Peter Wright at 12:18 PM in Site Maintenance | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)