Hung Connections and Loss of Service

[The Wirefox]

Dear All

I have been made aware that some of you have been experiencing difficulties in either entering the forum or posting threads. I must apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Proboards has been subjected to a DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service). When the DoS Attacker sends many packets of information and requests to a single network adapter, each computer in the network would experience effects from the DoS attack. This is an attempt by malicious persons to disble the servive and affects all proboards. These attacks are aimed for various reasons at many large organisations, banks, stores, government services etc.

The Proboards team have worked hard to mitigate effects of the attack but inevitably some of you will have experienced problems (I have myself)

THIS ATTACK CANNOT HARM YOUR PERSONAL COMPUTER OR DATA THEREIN

Things should be pretty much back to normal now and Proboards have issued this advice;

1) Try putting "www." in front of your forum's URL. -- For example, f-stop-cafe.com would be www.f-stop-cafe.com.

2) Reboot your computer

3) Reboot your router

The majority of users have reported that these three steps have alleviated their problems.


Again apologies for any inconvenience

Best regards

Steve

[robmarshall]

Thanks, Steve. Have you emailed Don to let him know - in case he is still having problems?

[The Wirefox]

Hi Rob, I have e-mailed all members just in case they are still having issues. Should have spotted this sooner but I assumed it was seasonal traffic.

By the way I was having real issues with connecting with mobile proboards app last night but it seems to be resolved now. Also if you use Proboards mobile ensure you have the latest update installed. There was a bug in the last but one update that prevented access via the widget. Latest update resolves this.

[Barry]

I received a email about this, which I presume was part of a mass email.

[The Wirefox]

Barry, yes i sent a call all members e-mail just in case some members were still having difficulties connecting to FSC

[DonS]

I'm baaaccckkkkkkkk!!!!!!! ;D
Thanx for the help guys...

[Barry]

Dec 11, 2011 15:45:50 GMT DonS said:

I'm baaaccckkkkkkkk!!!!!!! ;D
Thanx for the help guys...

And we all thought you were hiding from us ;D

[DonS]

Dec 11, 2011 15:56:57 GMT Barry said:

And we all thought you were hiding from us ;D

And I think I was BANNED by the mods here...

[Steaphany]

Dec 11, 2011 13:25:11 GMT The Wirefox said:

Things should be pretty much back to normal now and Proboards have issued this advice;

1) Try putting " in front of your forum's URL. -- For example, f-stop-cafe.com would be www.f-stop-cafe.com.

Having experience in LAN & WAN Administration, This would have little effect since the URL only deals with the Domain Name Service that translates www.f-stop-cafe.com or f-stop-cafe.com to a specific IP address. Unless proboards hosts the board on multiple servers with different IP addresses, where only one address is under attack, then you just end up at the same server with no resources or sockets available to process your page request.

Dec 11, 2011 13:25:11 GMT The Wirefox said:

2) Reboot your computer

3) Reboot your router

Both of these will have no effect on the situation unless your specific IP address is the one under attack. In such situations, and only if your address is dynamically assigned by a DHCP server, an attack on proboards will remain unaffected by your own equipment reboot.

Unlike a breach of security, nothing can be done to prevent or cope with a denial of service attack. The process is incredibly simple, write a small program that sends out thousands per second to millions per second of web page requests all targeting a single resource. The web servers simply keep hearing "I need you to send me web page ___fill in the blank___". They try to send the page, but by the time they complete one request, several thousand more came in and are queued up. Mixed in with the attack are actual requests for interactions with the web site. As you can imagine, even the largest web servers run out of resources, fail to complete a percentage of requests, or out right fail under the onslaught. If the web hosting company upgrades to larger and more capable servers, the attack either just takes longer or instead of millions of requests per second, they send hundreds of millions of requests per second.

You just can't win apart from removing your resources from the internet completely.

If proboards can't get out from being under this attack, their service may well cease to exist.