How to Protect Your Blog From an Advanced DDoS Attack

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Although it’s pretty much unlikely that any high profile hacktivists are going to be targeting your website via a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack anytime soon, that’s not necessarily grounds for sitting back relaxed and complacent without a backup / protection plan. DDoS attacks are becoming more prevalent and much easier to execute thanks improvement in technology, bandwidth and accessibility to tools and information on how to do it. We continue to see big brands like Sony get brought down momentarily by these attacks, and even the CIA’s website suffered this pain in 2012. It’s a serious threat.

ddos protection

For clarification, DDoS attacks happen through an overpowering of numerous computers, usually through the use of bots, that continuously send traffic to an IP address or website. As simple as this might seem, the effects can be brutal to a website. What’s worse is that the typical common security protocols that are set up to defend against hacking and intrusion just don’t work against DDoS attacks and taking matters into your own hands, whether it’s through WordPress security plugins or code tweaks and improvements are not sufficient. [Read more…]

Warning: WordPress.com Under Massive DDOS Attack, Temporarily Stopped

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WordPress.com, the host of many popular WordPress powered Blogs including TechCrunch, has been hit with a massive DDOS attack taking down the service. Blog owners are reporting slowness when logging in or loading their WordPress powered sites.

Graham Cluley, Senior technology consultant for Sophos Tweeted an email sent to VIP customers such as TechCrunch:

WordPress is currently being targeted by a extremely large Distributed Denial of Service attack which is affecting connectivity in some cases. The size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second.

We are working to mitigate the attack, but because of the extreme size, it is proving rather difficult. At this time, everything should be back to normal as the attack has subsided, but we are actively working with our upstream providers on measures to prevent such attacks from affecting connectivity going forward.

We will be making our VIP sites a priority in this endeavor, and as always, you can contact us [REDACTED] for the latest update. We will also update this post with more information as it becomes available.

[Read more…]

Is Posterous Being Targeted By Hackers?

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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.

Consumerist Brought Down Gawker Media

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Gawker Media has been struggling to serve their oh so necessary pageviews, and the culprit turned out to be none other than the Consumerist. The site is hosted by Gawker Media as part of the deal with the Consumers Union, who acquired it late last year. As the clever already deducted, the Consumerist site was attacked by hackers, which caused the technical difficulties. All sites are back up, although the Consumerist isn’t behaving perfectly well yet.