DDOS Attacks

[Egor]

A continuing discussion of problems we have had keeping our web pages and forum up in October 2010 because of malicious DDOS attacks. We got caught flat-footed and experienced significant downtime as we scrambled to obtain an expensive education in website security. For this we apologize.

Our solution was to hire one of the web's leading DDOS protection services. The way this works is our traffic is basically rerouted through their shield which identifies incoming attacks and within 2 minutes filters out 99% of the bad traffic while allowing all the legitimate traffic through.

Our early days with this company were very trying because our web pages kept going down in the attacks. They determined that the attackers were specifically targeting our old forum, which was a yabb forum that is written in perl. Because that type of forum does not cache page requests it is vulnerable to these attacks. So even with only 1% of the dirty traffic coming through that was enough to overload our server and take our website down.

Their solution was to crank the shield up to filter 100% of the malicious traffic and recommend switching forum software to something that uses a database and has caching ability. It wasn't a great solution because this also filtered out most of our legitimate traffic as well, as many of you know who could not access our pages during this period. But at least it gave me access to work on the website. (To make matters worse, MS was on vacation during this critical time).

So we had to scrap a 4-year old forum with more than 142,000 posts. We did manage to convert all the members over to the new one, but not any of the threads or posts. We now use a SMF forum with caching enabled. we also installed caching plug-ins to our wordpress blog to plug any vulnerabilities there.

By the time most of you read this the old forum will be vaporized and all content lost. That allows us to turn the DDOS shield back to where it is supposed to be at filtering 99% of dirty traffic while letting all the clean traffic through. So we start over. Good to do every now and then. I guess.

[sleeperz]

About all those illegal events against bonusbots I hope there are made some activity for guilty persons to get some penalties. Even in my country (where all the IT and Web crime and Hacking stuff came 5 years later as in USA) today after similar activities made against BB can easily lead to sentences.

[Egor]

Tracking down the person responsible is not so easy.