The website is back online.
As you are probably already aware, if you’ve tried to access this website in the last week, it hasn’t been available most of the time. It was either extremely slow, full of errors or showed an «account suspended» message.
This was because my entire web domain was subject to a prolonged Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS). Now up until a few days ago, I had no idea what this was. It’s basically a webmaster’s worst nightmare, that’s what it is… because I soon found out it’s one of the best way to bring a website down and simultaneosly get banned from your web hosting provider.
Those responsible for it use something like 100-1000 computer zombies with the primary intention of overload the main server where your files are hosted. They are able to take over all those computers which contain trojan viruses, and using their spare CPU cycles & bandwidth, they can then direct a full scale war-like attack on a single domain name. This takes a fair amount of effort & coordination, so it’s a technique supposedly reserved for high-profile websites like amazon.com or microsoft.com for example. I was probably nothing more than target practice to these people.
Who did this and why? Well, upon looking through my access logs about two weeks ago, I discovered that someone was using my domain name and server to host one of those useless pharmaceutical link farms. I imagine this was supposed to be a surreptitious operation, but I soon found out about it. It’s hard not to notice when there are 5000 daily requests for a non-existant file called «name.php». So as a temporary solution, I redirected all the incoming traffic to my homepage. This obviously pissed someone off enough to retalliate. So I say to them this:
Our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken. You cannot outlast us and we will defeat you… know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.
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