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THR is down right now...again

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Well, if somebody's trying to shut us up they're doing a poor job of it.

Oh, and hi guys... the attacks on THR finally convinced me I should sign up here too.

No real good reason that I haven't before now, other than the fact I found THR first, and I see a lot of the same names both places. Anyway... here I am.
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Ditto

Bob M.
 
Identifying the attacker would be good.

Getting Derek the help he needs to migrate to a better-protected host would do much to maintain THR/APS stability. Having to pay for the bandwidth generated by an inbound DDoS flood isn't exactly the best customer service. :(
 
So far, I haven't heard word one from the administrator about exactly what's been happening the past few weeks. There have been calls to get funds together, but without knowing what the problem is that strikes me as somewhat premature. Does anyone know what's happening?
 
Yeah, the downtime is getting awfully annoying. I too have been forced to get my fix over here on TFL. That's actually not so bad though. While I do prefer THR, there are good things to be said about the people here too. Besides, it seems we're mostly the same people on both anyway. One thing I did that is pretty stupid though... I, like many of you, do a lot of buying and selling on THR (certainly more buying then selling) Not even always in the sale sub-forums, but sometimes just in in private discussions. Problem is, I never thought much of not keeping a backup of messages, addresses, and info outside the storage of PMs. So right now I can't TCOB because needed info is in stored PMs only .. *sigh* My fault, but food for thought.
 
fire mission on the Chitown Data Centers fiber cables. All 4 of them. They are hidden within rigid conduit on diverse paths into the space. Maybe we can knock down the CPD dirty barmaid network.

Did I say that?
 
I've seen those earlier threads, and unless I missed it I don't see anything about who was actually doing the attack--if anyone--and what the fix might be. I guess we still don't have a fix. What about shutting it down to everything except recognized members when this happens?
 
Cos,
DoS attacks have absolutely nothing to do with members. The person (or persons) responsible haven't necessarily even ever visited the site. The fix, other than changing hosting services, is in the hands of the current hosting service to get off their bums and learn to increase their security and server capability of handling the attacks.
 
I think it could be any number of groups

We zumboed the Roanoke newspaper, I left messages with a lot of advertisers and editors asking for personal info to post on the net:D
Huff post and washington post won't let me post and I never said anything other then polite refutes, our anti Rudy threads are monumental, I'm sure Bloomberg doesn't like us...A billionaire like Bloomberg could easily have an aid who is zealous.
Someone is doing it!
 
Well guys, as many left wing polls as we nailed after the VT tragedy, I'm pretty well convinced some liberal hacker was brought in to get some payback.

I put NOTHING past the lunatic left.

Tin hat too tight? Maybe. But, I don't think so.
 
Well whatever it is DU and FR do to keep these attacks from shutting them down, we need to do the same.

Is there any hope of ID'ing the culprit?
 
I would hope so , Cosmoline

I don't know enough about the innernet to figure out who is doing it,
But I prefer we catch them and bring a lawsuit against them, or him.

I don't want a forum war, I want a trial.
 
Still down. I enjoy both TFL and THR..as it should be. Are any of you computer savy enough to tell the rest of us what the problem might be? Thanks.
 
I'm not sure how they have their router at THR set up, but if it's a UNIX or Linux box, you just have to add some sanity rules and it will stop DOS attacks. I'm already an IT developer but I'm going to take a class in IT security forensics soon to learn about this sort of thing.

Are any of you computer savy enough to tell the rest of us what the problem might be?
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A Denial of Service attack overloads the hardware with thousands of times more requests (and workload) than normal. All the bogus requests will either deny resources to legitimate users' requests of the server, or else it will crash the hardware. It looks like this attack has crashed many of the servers that run the network at the data center that THR uses.

Find the person(s) responsable, and press charges. Is that possible in this case?
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Unless you are an extremely skilled server admin who has correctly configured your server and network, then the answer is no. You have to set up your network/server correctly to even be able to track what happened. You have to configure the network topology correctly, and log everything, and not many sysadmins are that good.

To explain a little more, two things happened here. Some server somewhere in Chicago got compromised. Meaning that a hacker broke in and put a zombie program on the server in Chicago to launch a DOS attack. The sys admin in Chicago did not do his job and made a situation that allowed this to happen. His server had poor security that allowed it to be hacked. That was mistake number one.

Mistake number two happened at the data center where THR's server is housed. They were the recipient of a DOS attack and did not have an adequate response to handle it. The firewall should have recognized immediately that a DOS attack was occurring and at the very least shut down the firewall if it was going to crash their network. A more intelligent approach would have been to recognize and filter DOS traffic from that source IP range, which still lets in most or all legitimate traffic to THR's server. The data center that THR uses isn't prepared to respond to DOS attacks, it seems. So two mistakes were made here that allowed this to happen.

I hope that helps.
 
I'm not sure how they have their router at THR set up, but if it's a UNIX or Linux box, you just have to add some sanity rules and it will stop DOS attacks.
Click to expand...

I don't know how many of Derek's earlier comments you've read, but one of his comments was that the ISP that THR's host facility uses is basically incompetent. The are either unable or unwilling to deal with a DOS attack. When Derek notifies them that THR is under attack, they just turn off the network link to THR and turn it back on when the attack is over.
 
THR is in the process of finding a host that we can afford and that also has ability to handle such attacks. It turned out to be a hard search.
 
THR is in the process of finding a host that we can afford and that also has ability to handle such attacks. It turned out to be a hard search.
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Without a doubt I speak for many when I say thanks for the time, work and money put into THR/APS.

How successful was the fund raiser that we had a while back? Is it something that might need to be revisited?

I know an email address was given for Derek if anyone wanted to chip in, I have to think another fund drive would have better results.

Ron
 
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