Is Posterous Being Targeted By Hackers?
After launching their switch to Posterous campaign, it looks like Posterous has encountered its first “speed bump” on the path towards success which unfortunately disabled the site for a brief amount of time.
Today, from 1:41pm until shortly before 3p pacific time, we had an unscheduled and unplanned outage due to a denial of service (DoS) attack on our core load-balancing servers. That basically means that we were flooded with malicious amounts traffic our upstream providers were unable to handle, and we couldn’t respond to the requests of real users. During this time, all Posterous-hosted sites were out.
Since that time, we have brought up a new load balancer on a new address to try to evade the attack. For most people who use a .posterous.com address for their site, this means that your site should be back up shortly, if it’s not already. However, if you use a custom domain for your Posterous site, you are still pointed to our old address, which remains under attack. (Official Posterous Blog)
While Posterous’s new address will help the site stay online, the company may want to investigate where this attack is coming from, as the DoS hackers could be targeting a few users who are speaking out against hostile regimes.
Hack attacks aside, Posterous is quickly gaining fame within the tech industry, having recently partnered with Pulse in an attempt to help make news more social.
Hopefully the Posterous crew can quickly find a way to thwart these childish attempts to silence their users, although for now its good to see that the platform is back online.
By God Darnell , I sure hope Posterous is not being targeted by hackers! I have 2 Posterous blogs, both using posterous.com addresses, one of which has 39 subscribers, 322 posts and 6,242 site views. This site has more traffic than my main website!
I really like Posterous, so I hope they get everything worked out and better yet, the hackers brought to justice (yeah right!). Because after getting banned by wordpress.com for posting a couple of posts I got from article directories, I really appreciate Posterous’ liberal freedom policy.
Long live Posterous!
Been looking into posterous lately so really hope they get these issues ironed out.
@ Thomas: I actually almost switched to Posterous (despite the fact that I love WordPress) until I discovered the P2 theme.
That aside, every once in a while these hackers are brought to justice, although more likely than not it seems that DoS attacks are usually waged from nations where freedom of speech is a luxury, not a right.