Sigh. It was too good to be true. Hours after updating the site (and feeling pleased with myself) because I caught a whiff of something threatening it, a blistering attack came along, in the form of essentially a denial of service attack from hundreds of separate machines/robots all from the same referring site. (See Josh Davis’ report on such things for the Wired Science TV show last year. Video here.) I tried everything I could think of to get rid of it and could not win*. In the end, my hosts shut down my account and suspended the domain (fair enough - actually might have helped), and (not cool) one of their fine technical support people blamed me for the problem (despite the fact that it was an external attack, and I was running software supplied and supported by them). None of them were able to do anything more than I could, interestingly. (I just had the one jerk, the others were fine.)
In the end, I just waited for a day or so for it to hopefully go away. It did. I don’t know when it might happen again or what I did to deserve the hassle, and the loss of several hours during which I could have done useful physics and other things, and/or continued working through the excellent Season One of Heroes (more later!). Annoying. Anyway, the blog is back for a while, and so you can get your daily fix of whatever it is I’m supplying that brings you here. Thanks for being patient, and for your support and readership.
By the way, in one of several attempts to diagnose the problem I deleted the personalized style files that give the blog its look, so the blog will look rather vanilla-ish for a while, until I can rebuild that all.
It never rains but it pours…
-cvj
*That includes trying to hard-wire things to block entries from a specific referrer.
Wow. Glad you’re back.
I’m so sorry, Clifford. I see now that blogs suffer the same vandalistic behavior that web sites experience. In the summer of 2005, I had that same kind of attack that you just described, at perhaps a lower intensity, and it continued for about one month. Verio’s only advice to me was to put the domains from where the attacks came into my .htaccess file, in order to forbid them access. There were something like a thousand of them (distributed attack), but some of them were from blocks of IP domains that were cycling through the last set of addresses. That helped me a little, I but still lost many hours. I hope the sys admins can devise better strategies against these kinds of attacks so their clients don’t lose so much time trying to solve it on their own.
I’m glad you’re back. I once got annoyed at the spambots looking around my sites for email addresses and wrote some php to give them blank pages. It was a pain, and likely had no real effect on spam.
I miss the Asymptotia logo — glad to hear things are settling down and it will be back anon.
Amara: - Yes, I tried methods of that nature. Did not seem to work. I have a few more things to try for next time.
-cvj
Thanks Carl and Supernova. I hope to rebuild the site look on the weekend.
-cvj
I hope you can recover from the attack as smoothly as possible.
Best wishes.
Glad you’re back! Good luck with the rebuilding.
Glad to hear you beat the buggers Clifford!
Sorry. This is disturbing. If the attackers can be identified, I hope the ISP will take both criminal and civil action against them. I also think that when you purchase hosting services from a provider, they should have mechanisms in place to shut off DOS attacks pretty quickly without affecting your site. If they don’t well… they should….
Anyway it is comforting to see the site back.
e.
Well… I don’t think I beat them. The buggers just went away for now.
But thanks.
-cvj
Ah. Crapflooding. Sniff. Those were the days.
Back in the day, the crapflooders were targetting MovableType and LiveJournal.
See I, II, III,
IV.
Is WordPress the new target, or are you particularly unlucky?
I’m glad that things are back on track; I did feel rather put out when I was denied access to my daily fix. For want of a lesser cliche, keep up the good work CVJ - don’t let the buggers grind you down (It is rare to be able to seize on a precedent for the use of improper language on an essentially civilised, and civil, blog.)
Glad to see you back up.
I like this version. My browser couldn’t read your customized one.
Jacques - thanks for the links. Interesting reading.
I think I was unlucky. I can see no reason why it was tied to Wordpress per se….
Cheers,
-cvj
Missed you yesterday, glad you’re back!
Glad you’re back.
–IP
I like this version. My browser couldn’t read your customized one.
I second that!!
Now you have recovered from this symptom, glad to have you back in black!