OZARK MOUNTAIN TRIKERS FORUM

News
 
Outages May 5th - May 6th 2008 (DDoS)
May 6, 2008, 9:22 am

We experienced a large Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) on our main network Monday, May 05, 2008 beginning roughly around 3:54PM PST. We block this kind of malicious activity on a regular basis and keep it from affecting the services we provide. However, this was a very large scale and targeted DDoS attack (focused primarily at our ActiveBoard servers) which to this moment still continues. We have blocked the majority of the malicious traffic, and as a result ActiveBoards should be accessible loading fairly quickly at the moment.

To give you an idea of where we are at right now, well over 1000 unique IP addresses are being filtered, and at peak we were filtering roughly 17 billion connections per second. More information about DOS attacks can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

We take every effort to resolve network issues as quickly as possible, however this is a rare circumstance which is requiring more time to resolve. While the outage and intermittent service persisted far longer than we would have liked, it easily could have taken longer to resolve if not for the firewall technology utilized within our current infrastructure.

CURRENTLY: We have blocked the majority of the traffic and ActiveBoards should be accessible. Please note that we are still undergoing the DDoS attack and as a result occasionally you may notice intermittent service with ActiveBoard.

UPDATE: The majority of the issues have been resolved. Minor problems might crop up, but the world should be making sense once again.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. If you have anymore questions or concerns please don't hesitate to ask.

 
Server Outages
March 12, 2007, 2:00 am

 I want to provide you with some more detail surrounding the server issues that occurred earlier today.

This morning, we experienced a large Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) on our main network. We block this kind of malicious activity on a regular basis and keep it from affecting the services we provide. However, this was a very large scale and targeted DDoS attack which caused the 3 4 hour window of intermittent availability you may have experienced. To give you and idea of the size, during the peak of the attack we were filtering over 10 billion malicious connections per hour.

While we take every effort to resolve network issues as quickly as possible, this was a very different and unique circumstance which required more time to resolve. We are not satisfied with the length of time our services were effected, however, it easily could have taken longer to resolve if not for the technology utilized within our current infrastructure. We have taken steps to ensure this does not occur in the future including the possibility of moving Gold customers to an entirely seperate network.

I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. If you have anymore questions or concerns please don't hesitate to ask.

Best Regards,
Rajiv Khaneja
Sparklit

P.S. More information about DOS attacks can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack