Sunday, 8 October 2006
Simpy DDoSed 
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Spam and DoS (or D-DoS) ( Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are probably things I "love" the most, at least when it comes to things involved in running Simpy. Spam attempts are ongoing, and spammers get zapped regularly. Sometimes in real-time, sometimes in batches at different times of the day. Some make it through. Some spam is reported by helpful users (thank you and please keep reporting spam when you see it!). It's an ongoing battle.
Denial of service attacks on Simpy are a lot more rare. Distributed flavours of DoS are even less common, but they do happen occasionally. A heavily distributed DDoS happened this morning. I have not analyzed the logs yet, but it looks like it might involve a few hundred bots spread around the planet. It started around 06:00 EDT, and is still going (well, trying to) now at 10:45 AM EDT. This caused some "503 Service Unavailable" errors earlier this morning. Sorry about that!
I'll try doing something to reduce the effect of these attacks in the future, but any piece of advice about how to deal with this would be welcome.
Posted by at 10:59 AM in News & Announcements
Comments on this entry:
Hi Otis,
Why don't you add a hyperlink "Report Spam" next to "History" on each link so that we can report a spam link easily to you, and also maybe a similar link on a user's profile so we can report a consistently spamming user to you? It would make it much easier for us to report and you would get a consistent report format. Cheers, L.
I just don't understand why some people would just go around DOS-ing websites. I have seen some people try to extort money by DOS-ing though.
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