Wow, Have we Come THIS FAR!!!???
SkiSoutheast.com, HighCountryWeather.com, HighCountryWebCams.com unaffected…
What a crazy, crazy last 30 hours or so it has been! Beginning sometime on late Sunday or Monday – some entity began a DDoS Attack or a denial of service attack on SkiNC.com and SkiNorthCarolina.com. The denial of service seemed to be aimed solely at the Messageboard as all of the IIS errors and pages hit were all on one messageboard page.
According to our programmers, it was obvious that one of two things took place. Someone or some entity was purposely ONLY attempting to shut SkiNC down OR the messageboard itself. Although the messageboard is accessible via both SkiNC and SkiSoutheast it is actually housed on SkiNC – therefore the attack only shut down SkiNC.
DDoS attacks are not all that uncommon, however in our 15+ years and with hosting 1100 websites in 34 states and a few countries we’ve never seen one first hand. Our chief programmer shared the fact that beginning sometime early on Monday AM we began seeing more than 600,000 pageload attempts on ONE page of the messageboard. Those attempts pretty much killed the SkiNC and SkiNorthCarolina domains for nearly 30 hours. The rest of the ski network of SkiSoutheast.com, HighCountryWeather.com and HighCountryWebcams.com continued to operate although they WERE slower than Christmas.
We basically had to shut down the messageboard and block the IP# that initiated the attack before we could get a handle on things. As late as 8am this morning we were being flooded with server errors that totaled in the tens of thousands per every few seconds!
Wow…I GUESS we could look at it with a glass half full approach as we’d have some impressive visits and PAGEVIEWS to inflate our statistics with!?!? We’ve basically trashed all of those log files and stats and everything looks good again.
For those interested, IT DOES NOT APPEAR to have been a malicious attack on SkiNC or the messageboard itself as we have traced the IP number to a location outside of our primary coverage area. Of course we are still investigating the event.
Sorry for any inconvenience for those attempting to visit the sites or messageboard on Monday.
…and now back to our regularly scheduled programming 😉
Feel free to email me your thoughts at [email protected]