Sph2sail February 28, 2004 Share February 28, 2004 Sorry all, but sometimes the Internet is a rather hostile place. We seem to have been the target of an email based denial of service attack at WAMAS.org today. Dunno why or what for, but it is frustrating for all. This took us out, along with many other sites on the same server for maybe an hour. We are back, but... We apologize for the outage and hope that it does not re-occur. That said, it is the internet, ya know. steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sph2sail February 29, 2004 Author Share February 29, 2004 We just got hit again. So... the officers and webmaster are taking steps to avoid future problems. Frustrating, as it seems out of character for this to be happening to us. We aren't Microsoft or SCO ya know... Hopefully, we are back up to stay. steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sph2sail March 2, 2004 Author Share March 2, 2004 Nathan, our webmaster, gave the officers the following report about these outages. I just want to re-state my thanks to him for professionalism and delivery of a solid product. Hopefully, we will not get hammered again any time soon. We, the officers, greatly appreciate his support and the positive results to date. Steve Ok here is the scoop on the down time saturday. Since I dont know the tech level of every-one that reads this... let me explain a little... At all hosting companies they have a bank of servers, each server has between 150 and 600 websites on it. This weekend there was denial of service attack against an anti-spyware site that was on the same server as wamas.org. This clogged up all of the sites on the server. Once the host company found the problem they made a corporate decision and moved the site that was being attacked and all of the sites like it to a seperate server. The hosting company is turning the matter over to Law inforcment but like all cyber crime there is little chance that the culprits will caught. Will we be safe from this ever happening in the future? Is this a hosting service specific problem? No and No Read this No host is safe unless they have either no real good connection to the internet or no serious clients. If they have no clients they are safe from attack but they are also to slow to use. Any place that we host our site will have this potential unless we have a dedicated server (too expensive) so that no other site lives with us. We could chose to go to a small local host and have no performance, but if they are a good hosting company (with a speedy connection) then a lot of other sites will be there also and the chance for an attack is there. I think that we need to understand that we never had these problems before because we were with a small host that didn't have the client load. This worked for a while, but we now have a forum, a chat room, more than 60 web pages, 5000+ files and thousands of links, both in and out of the site. This gives us impact to help with our mission, but it also means we need more of a host than we had before. We have had more than 3500 hits on our front page in less than a month and and for the first time, more users are in the site than on the board. This means that our web presence is growing. and we are making more impact. I get links every week (from site users) to add to the site so I know you and others are getting through the site. Here are the stats from feb (from the AWSTATS service) Unique visitors 2321 Number of visits 4429 Page views 47998 So it looks like we are going to just keep growing and if we have a down time you can count on the fact that it will be short lived (I monitor the site with a service) and that if ever we have a real crash, we have a nightly back-up that will save the board and all of the info we have built in it. Bear with me and I will work to make us more secure while we keep growing into a larger more info driven site that will help more reef people in the area grow in the hobby. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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