The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.
Attacked
: 601am confirms that the host for many blogs — including Instapundit and this one — have been under dos attack. They seem to be putting out the fire.
: UPDATE: The wonderful Stacy from Hosting Matters says in the comments this is NOT a DOS attack. They are running at 100 percent on their pipe.
I believe it — this site was not accessable for a long time today, as well as josh’s and a few others.
back when spammers were retaliating against spamhaus, a watchdog organization, they said they were able to avert subsequent attacks after leveraging some of stuff provided my melior, inc. which u can read about at http://www.ddos.com/
mebbe u’ll wanna pass that along to powers that be. i have no personal experience with these guys, i’ve just “heard” about’em.
What’s a DOS attack? Make it stop.
I wouldn’t take it too personally – I’ve been having trouble browsing to both conservative and liberal blogs. I think it’s more a reflection of the massive interest in the election.
AllenS, and anyone else who’s new to the term:
DOS (also often typed as DoS) stands for “denial of service”. It’s the most common, easiest way to attack a website or any other Internet site via computerized means.
When you visit a site on the web, it’s done by your web browser sending a request to the website, which the website then responds to with the text you’re seeing here.
A DoS is performed simply by sending lots and lots and lots and lots of requests. You could come fairly close to this by hitting ‘reload’ in your browser as fast as you can. Better still is to write a program that sends hundreds of requests a second. It takes very little programming knowledge to write such a thing. Fortunately, it takes only slightly more skill to write a website server that detects this, and throws away the vast majority of the requests (“hey, 126.492.10.2 just sent me 10000 requests; I’ll only send one page of text, though”). I figure most websites have this feature. (Or the equivalent; I’m a programmer, but not a network programming expert.)
However, even if a website reject scads of requests, it still has to look at each request long enough to know it should throw it away. It’s like getting a whole lot of bright flashing lights in your face; you quickly learn to ignore most of them, but it’s still annoying.
There’s a slightly more advanced type of DoS, called a distributed DoS, or DDoS. This involves getting a bunch of computers to send thousands of requests all at the same time. That typically requires getting a virus installed on a bunch of computers the attacker doesn’t own.
I suspect it’s a little of what Jimmy said, too – a lot of people are legitimately visiting these sites, and they’re grunting under the strain. Nothing to see here, folks (pun unintended).
From the HostingMatters site, linked to above:
The NOC informs me that we are utilizing 120% of our total bandwidth commitment and have been for a bit now.
Given the magnitude of this event, which we will say we underestimated to certain extent, we are continuing to see intermittent issues with certain routes timing out or experiencing significant lags.
For those who have asked, there is indeed an easy way to think about it: it’s like trying to drink from a fire hose pumping out 150 gallons per second.
Moral of the story: HostingMatters provides great service at a great price. But on a high traffic day, InstaPundit et al will pull you down.
Then again, my old hosting company was in San Francisco, which has other attendant risks….
Thanks Paul.
Well. What’s the verdict – DoS or “too much traffic”?!? If it’s a DoS, someone should call the UN and ask for a security council veto or something. ;) :P
As linked by Michele above, and as many were directly told in support tickets (including the proprietor of this very site), this is certainly not a DOS attack. We are still running at 100% usage, so access will be intermittent. It’s really not that complex a concept.
