Hosting Matters, the company that hosts Petrified Truth, is apparently experiencing repeated Denial of Service (DoS) attacks from Internet hackers, so the site has been inaccessible for short or extended periods of time recently. That was the case most of today; only a very few visitors got through.
Many other sites have also been affected, including InstaPundit -- the most popular blog around. Naturally, he has an emergency back-up site. That seems like overkill for my site, but it's a possibility if this sort of thing continues.
According to WorldNetDaily, Hosting Matters is being attacked because it hosts an anti-terrorist site that not only annoys the bad guys but also gets real results.
A website devoted to shutting down Internet supporters of terrorism has itself been shut down by denial-of-service attacks directed from Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, according to a report in Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.Internet Haganah, an Israeli-based website that works to uncover and shut down terrorist-sponsored Internet entities, was attacked by hackers beginning Thursday.
Supporters of a number of al Qaida-affiliated forums registered to Saudis and running in Malaysia declared "an online jihad against Haganah" after eight such terror-related sites lost their third-party DNS service, according to a spokesman for the organization. The result was that the sites dropped offline, and four of them remain offline.
GeoCities sites have been used to distribute the attack tools, and a site at Everyone's Internet posted graphics that show not just how to use the tools, but specifically how to use them to attack the site.
Hosting Matters has done its best to keep the site online in the face of an increasing level of hostile traffic, but there's only so much one can do unless you can get someone at the backbone level to block the incoming attacks, explained Internet Haganah.
Winds of Change has been following the situation today as well, and has more details if you're interested.
Posted by Alan at October 21, 2003 05:15 PM