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So many of our faithful readers probably noticed that JohnCow was down all day on June 24th 2008.

Want to know why?

A freaking DOS Attack!

Here’s what happened. We came into the office yesterday and started our day and the first thing we noticed was that our website was down. So what did we do? We called our hosting company who then told us that we were hit by a DoS attack and hopefully our website should be up soon. Well our website came back up, at 5pm…. It was down our whole day.

Are you all familiar with what a DoS attack is?

Or actually another name for it is called ‘Denial-of-Service’ Attack. See what happens when this type of attack happens on a website is when somebody is constantly pinging the website over and over and over again. What this will then do is consume resources to the point that our website is shut down like it was all day yesterday. Our hosting provider (Liquid Web) had to reroute the IP that was getting hit, until the attack stops. This one was behind the MCI network and it took a few hours for MCI to take action.

Now normally these types of attacks generally happen to high-profile websites (We feel so Honored! Okay, not so much.), such websites as let’s say Banks or a website that will take credit card payments are often targets. It also appears that the attack was pointed towards a bunch of sites on sitepoint marketplace and since our Video Game Reviews blog from the COWpetition is on the same IP as JohnCow.. well we suffered. (Yes we are addressing this :) )

Now these DoS attacks are actually considered violations of: Laws of individual nations and IAB’s Internet proper use policy.

We thought we would look more into these DoS attacks and see what other websites had been crippled by them this year.

Well on May 29th 2008 – Revision3 posted about how their servers were crippled on Memorial Day weeks by DoS attacks. You can read all about their attack here:

http://revision3.com/blog/2008/05/29/inside-the-attack-that-crippled-revision3/

We also came across another post, here:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/23/slideshare-slammed-with-ddos-attacks-from-china/

That talks about how SlideShare was crippled by DoS attacks just one day before CNN was also crippled by a DOS attack http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/18/cnn.websites/. Now this roughly happened around April 18th 2008.

How about a DoS attack that was set up to cripple the Church of Scientology but instead began to target a school in the Netherlands. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/anonymous-hacke.html

So if these attacks are violations, then what’s being done to prevent them?

There is a company out there called ‘Prolexic‘ that is available to help protect websites from these DoS attacks. Wondering how they work? Pretty simple actually, well when a website/server is being attacked they will actually substitue one of their servers.

But what about the actual people? Are we able to find these people who are actually doing the attacks and brand their behinds to teach them a lesson? Well chances are most of these guys are sitting in their parents basement with comic books stacked to the ceiling and have rerouted and cloaked themselves so well that it would be next to impossible to find them.

So the question to them is… imagine what you could accomplish if you actually spent that time doing something to generate income?

Have you ever had a DoS attack?

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