Most users online fixed

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2004-12-30 10:43pm

The "most users online" count skyrocketed to 1721 this afternoon as a result of what was effectively a DDOS attack. After blocking it, I copied the "most users online" data from the Archives in order to restore the pre-attack value. Just in case you were wondering about that.

Post by **Ghost Rider** » 2004-12-30 10:44pm

Cool...at least it's back to it's true number and not the bloated DDOS attack one.

Glad that only lasted for a few hours and din't cause anything from what appears permanent.

J · Post by J » 2004-12-30 10:51pm

I was wondering why the board was so slow and finally stopped loading for a while this afternoon....a DDOS attack would do the trick.

Laird · Post by **Laird** » 2004-12-30 11:57pm

Banned Shakkara finally?

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2004-12-31 12:21am

For those who are curious about the technical details, it was the "Santy" worm. The worm was not capable of penetrating this system because it was patched as soon as the vulnerability became known to the public, but as is often the case with widely deployed software, you can patch your own box but the rest of the Internet won't bother. So the worm infects unpatched systems and then generates massive traffic as it attempts to propagate itself.

In other words, the software was patched so it was not vulnerable to the worm, but we were still vulnerable to the sheer traffic generated by the worm as it mindlessly searched for victims. I blocked the worm in .htaccess; hopefully we won't be seeing another variant outbreak on a similar scale using a different request string.

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2004-12-31 07:53am

And here I am thinking that perhaps this image would be the next one I would see.

That's a screenshot of Santy in action...

Should have known better, you subscribe to Secuina rite?

Alyeska · Post by **Alyeska** » 2004-12-31 10:20am

Laird wrote:Banned Shakkara finally?

Actualy banning Shakkara would INCREASE the traffic to the board. She doesn't bother with DOS attacks on boards she has open access to.

Tribun · Post by **Tribun** » 2004-12-31 10:46am

What is a DDOS attack?
(Does it mean "Direct Disk Operation System-attack"?)

Sarevok · Post by **Sarevok** » 2004-12-31 10:52am

It is called denial of service attack, basicaly overloads a site with immense traffic.

Tribun · Post by **Tribun** » 2004-12-31 10:53am

The Shadow wrote:It is called denial of service attack, basicaly overloads a site with immense traffic.

Spamming a site into oblivion?

Sarevok · Post by **Sarevok** » 2004-12-31 11:05am

Yeah something like that.

Post by **Dalton** » 2004-12-31 12:48pm

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) happens when a whole bunch of computers is infected with a worm and then at a certain point someone instructs each computer to constantly ping a certain website, causing a denial of service.