Why were vB.com and .org down earlier?

[Wayne Luke]

The issue has been resolved and the servers are speedier than they have been in weeks. So I think it is time to close this before it gets out of hand.

[Fusion]

Be nice y'all, she can't help it...

I hear MySpace is effective against such afflictions.

[Ohiosweetheart]

Really? I thought that it was the staff that was doing it to prevent complaints for users.

What planet do you live on? Because it can't be planet Earth.

That's just plain ridiculous, sorry.

You can't be serious? Surely. Really? Wowsers.

Edit: Both sites resolving quickly for me now.

Be nice y'all, she can't help it...

[carntheroos4eva]

DDoS attacks aren't personal..

No they aren't but I reckon it might have something to do with people who have decided to take action on the sites, which HAS happened before.

[Mr. Mikey]

Noticed that yesterday....

DDOS attacks again from people who possibly have been banned or have a grudge or want to hack vBulletin to try and get a free copy of the software.

Don't know why they would waste their time doing that sort of thing. It only cheeses us off and makes things unusable for everyone.

DDoS attacks aren't personal..

[Shamil.]

Ray, you wouldn't happen to know if the systems doing so were Tor Servers? I've had about 6 servers going down due to Tor Servers... one of them lead to an imminent drive failure.

[kmike]

Well it looks like things are nice and fast again for the moment. This doesn't appear to have been a classic DDOS attack, but rather a dozen or so clients that were requesting tens of thousands of pages, and that seems to have been the bulk of the problem.

I don't think a dozen of clients could have saturated the pipe to the point where the server was responding with 2 second pings. And if they could, it was also an extremely lousy job by the server administrators in filtering the offenders.

[MRGTB]

I wouldn't be that surprised if it's already crossed there mind about moving servers if things continue like this. Although, DDOS attacks can happen no matter what server your on.

[bigwater]

I still don't know why vB sticks with ThePlanet after all the problems they've had over the last couple of years. Most of my server work is spent moving clients off of ThePlanet and onto better first tier backbone providers. I won't publically speculate on reasons why, but there are so many better backbone providers out there that it really makes me wonder.

I'm not personally complaining about vB's site... it comes up when it does...20 seconds between page requests is nothing as I'm usually hitting a couple of other sites in a different browser instance to check on other things at the same time. I fly between sites all day long anyway, so I don't worry about a bit of a delay, but it's still curious why a high profile corporate structure sticks with a provider that makes most people wait for what seems like an eternity for pages to be served.

[Floris]

Well it looks like things are nice and fast again for the moment. This doesn't appear to have been a classic DDOS attack, but rather a dozen or so clients that were requesting tens of thousands of pages, and that seems to have been the bulk of the problem.

A dozen of clients (unique hosts I assume) took this site to its knees for 12+ hours? linux lets you grep the results from netstat and count it:
if unique_ip_amount_counted > average_number { block for 1 hour } .. should have easily stopped 12+ clients flooding the server with requests.

Multiple hosts requesting multiple pages to cause a denial of service, is distributed. It is a classic DDoS attack, just a very weak one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

But I am glad the site is back.

[MRGTB]

Most sites are fine Lynne, and I've just done a local speed test and all is fine there too.

http://www.speedtest.net/

[Lynne]

I don't think this has been limited to just vBulletin you know, I've been experiencing problem on the net with slow speeds on many sites (sometimes intermittent) since this whole DDOS thing kicked-off last week with Twitter getting hit hard first.

I've even noticed my own site suffering from intermittent loading problems this week (which is just not normal), and it's hosted by NameCheap who got hit hard by DDOS attacks not that long ago. Seems to me like "mass" DDOS attacks are taking place here.

Are you sure it isn't your own ISP? Try doing a trace from your computer (not a site like network-tools) the next time you have problems and see if it fully gets out of your own local area without problems.

[MRGTB]

I don't think this has been limited to just vBulletin you know, I've been experiencing problem on the net with slow speeds on many sites (sometimes intermittent) since this whole DDOS thing kicked-off last week with Twitter getting hit hard first.

I've even noticed my own site suffering from intermittent loading problems this week (which is just not normal), and it's hosted by NameCheap who got hit hard by DDOS attacks not that long ago. Seems to me like "mass" DDOS attacks are taking place here.

[Ray Morgan]

Well it looks like things are nice and fast again for the moment. This doesn't appear to have been a classic DDOS attack, but rather a dozen or so clients that were requesting tens of thousands of pages, and that seems to have been the bulk of the problem.

[shelley_c]

Noticed that yesterday....

DDOS attacks again from people who possibly have been banned or have a grudge or want to hack vBulletin to try and get a free copy of the software.

Don't know why they would waste their time doing that sort of thing. It only cheeses us off and makes things unusable for everyone.

You can't be serious? Surely. Really? Wowsers.

Edit: Both sites resolving quickly for me now.