At this writing (1605 GMT 28 April 2006), a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Hosting Matter's servers appears to have been going on for a couple of hours (hat tip Charles Johnson ). Access to a number of high-traffic websites is being affected.
UPDATE 1810 GMT 28 April 2006: Stacy of Hosting Matters reports that the attack has been thwarted. The affected blogs all seem to be back.
Here are some quick tips for adding simple Textile formatting to your comments, though you can also use proper HTML tags:
*This* puts text in bold.
_This_ puts text in italics.
bq. This "bq." at the beginning of a paragraph, flush with the left hand side and with a space after it, is the code to indent one paragraph of text as a block quote.
To add a live URL, "Text to display":http://windsofchange.net/ (no spaces between) will show up as Text to display. Always use this for links - otherwise you will screw up the columns on our main blog page.
...while Winds, hosted with the good folks at ServInt, keeps rolling on....
They got Lileks. NERDSSSSSSSS!!!!!
Totten is down, too.
Instapundit backup now up at http://instabackup.blog spot.com/
Is hotmail permanently banned from the email field?
Powerline is still down. Hugh Hewitt finally came up.
Probably unrelated, but it looks like Vodkapundit is down. There's a hosting provider's "parking page" there instead of the blog.
Does anyone know what's up?
There's a DOS attack from (supposedly) Saudi Arabia.
It's hosing my site, too, and HM took a whole block of servers offline until they can counter the attack (it took my sites down, too).
The reports of HM being completely back are false (as of 4:51 EST).
Mark, yes it is. We've received a lot of probing attacks and nuisance spams with hotmail addresses.
Levels of spam continue to increase, and short of killing spammers no viable solution seems to be in sight. The major services become increasingly 'unaffordable' to keep out of the ban column as workload increases.
Come to think of it, we've noticed server slowdowns from spam storms in the past. As spam levels continue to increase, the line between spamming and DDOS attacks is itself beginning to blur.
The attacks continue. Instapundit went down again, and Captain's Quarters is now off-line.
We've been down all day long and continue to have problems.
Security Watchtower
Other than the one mention of Saudi Arabia as being the originator of the attack on LGF, I've seen nothing else as to who/what might be responsible.
@hotmail is the anonymous sign-up service commonly used by all Arabs - does "hotmail" appreciate the fact that it's been hijacked by the bad guys? You'd think if a company is being used by multiple beheaders doing bad things both on the ground and on the internet to the point that all of their clients are being banned, it would be a cause for concern and to take action against said beheaders and terrorist hijackers.
Is there further information on the current DOS, and if not, is it SOP to keep that sort of information secret?
NahnCee #13:
Good questions all, and I don't have any clear answers. Re. secrecy: judging from a look around Hosting Matters' site, they are trying to be responsive to the bloggers they host, and share information. On the other hand, "DDoS directed at us, and succeeding at least to an extent" isn't something they probably see as helping to draw in new customers. So it would only be human nature to underplay it.
This post was meant more as a Notice as I have no claim to expertise in this area. Please post useful links you encounter that provide more of the backstory to this event.