hacker-ninja tagged: , ,

Back From Attack!

Posted by in Blogging, Crime, Internet


What a month it has been for this blog!

I switched from one host to another when the first seemed to be less and less reliable at providing stable uptime.  Then I had to make a switch again when the second host was unwilling to assist me in moving things from one server to another.  And right after I got settled into a new host, hackers launched an attack that delayed — and in some cases prevented — the site from loading for the past two days.

Let me explain something important: when it comes to websites, I’m a Mac guy, not a PC guy.

I know it’s a cliché, but it’s also apropos.  I’m the creative type, the writer, who wants to sign on to existing software and create something.  Hopefully, it’s something entertaining that you, the reader, feels hasn’t been a waste of your time after you’ve read it.  But in any case, that’s how I approach blogging.

If I were the PC guy type, I’d want to design the software that runs the blog. Or I’d at least want to custom code my own site.  I’d work with HTML and CSS and other programming languages to tweak everything just the way I wanted it.  I have just enough PC guy in me that when I need to do something minor in these code languages, I usually can figure out how.  If it’s complex, then it’s probably out of my capabilities.

So being the Mac guy type, I don’t know what a DDOS attack is.  Part of me doesn’t even want to care; that part would rather focus on the frustration of seeing my site fail to load.  Again.

But with all of my hosting difficulties of late, I’d learned a lot more about websites than I ever anticipated I’d have to.

I learned that DDOS stands for Distributed Denial of Service.  A DDOS attack involves hackers flooding a server with so many requests at once that all of its resources get taken up to the point that websites hosted on that particular server can’t load.  So what you get when you try to visit a site whose server is under attack is either a 500 error or a message that the site’s load timed out.

Even the owner of the site can’t get in, so I was as shut out as anyone else who tried to visit over the past few days.  There were glimmers of hope, as the site would sometimes load briefly, but then go down again.

My host learned of the problem quickly and took efforts to not only stop the attack but switch IP addresses so that the attack would stop affecting those sites.  But there was a problem with this:  you don’t change IP addresses on a dime.  Once you switch, you then have to make all of the internet providers understand that they need to look for the same site in a different place.  This takes up to 10 hours or so for everyone around the world to catch up.

Then there was another problem: when they changed IP addresses, the hacker apparently realized it and followed.  (The “hacker” may well have been malware that was doing it automatically, but some jerk still had to write the malware, so at some point, a hacker was unquestionably involved.)

Unlike the prior hosting problem, which was an internal issue with a datacenter that suffered problems on an almost monthly basis, this was a problem that originated on the outside, and could have easily affected any hosting company.

Incidentally, while I was in the middle of dealing with this, I received an automated email from my old host that their servers were being upgraded and might be down or delayed for a while.  So either way, my site was just going to have trouble this week.

In February, my site was up a total of 85.4% of the time.  That means almost 15% of the month, it wasn’t accessible.  That’s not acceptable on any level.  So now it is March, and hopefully, we’re done with any major outages.

And I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they catch whoever started it, and that they did to his computer equipment what that angry Texas father did to his daughter’s laptop after she wrote that scathing post about her parents.

Just for starters.