Just went to look at that other site and they're apparently suffering through a DoS attack.

I'm thinking some ticked off Ford owner who has nothing better to do while his truck is in the shop....

 

Someones hacking away ... wonder if the hacker can be traced.

 

DOS attacks are hard to trace, especially if they're distributed. Usually someone will hack a box somewhere else, then do the attack from that machine. When you trace it, the people who were hacked may have no clue. If it's distributed, you're at the mercy of the hacker.

 

Sorry I didnt see this thread before I posted mine, but that still sucks.

 

Yea they got hit pretty bad... not shure if anyone saw the pic and the message on the homepage, but the hacker left some nasty stuff on there.

Horace

 

They are back...........

 

what did the hacker leave on the front page

its probably some guy or girl that is a tree hugger and doesn't even have a car

 

We do not know who attacked us yesterday. We had two seperate situations. First, a hacker hacked into our mysql database server and changed a news item on our front page. We discovered the change within 4 minutes and pulled it. He then changed it again. I pulled the server offline at that point and contacted our security consultant for assistance. Within an hour and a half the two of us had tightened things up and locked him out and had the site back up and running. This obviously ticked off the hacker in question because he then hit us with a distributed denial of service attack from literally all over the world. The type of attack he hit us with there really isn't much of a defense for at this time. We were getting hit by 28 different pc's generating 240 continuous requests when I pulled the site offline again. I emailed the hacker at the address he had given in the original message and let him know that he had won and that we gave up. Sometime soon after that the attacks stopped and I put the site back online. Thus far the attacks have not started back up and we hope it continues that way. If you wish to read up on DDoS attacks you can read about them here - http://www.grc.com/dos/drdos.htm . After spending all night digging through log files and researching this problem I want to crawl into a hole and pull a blanket over my head - it's a scary world out there. There are a number of attacks that can be and are regularly done that can bring a site to its knees and there isn't much that can be done about it until after the fact with a LOT of work and if the hacker wishes he can just switch to another and hit you immediately again. I will be contacting Jack to give him my phone number so I can share what information we have on it so he can be as prepared as possible. BTW, the vBulletin site was taken down for over a month by attacks such as this.

-Steve St.Laurent
TDR Webmaster

 

Glad to hear you got it all sorted out and back on line Steve.
These folks that pull these stunts have way too much free time on their hands.

Ed

 

Hmmmm. Did you trace the address to his ISP? I would report it.

MikeyB

 

Ohhhhh, if ONLY it were that easy Mike! This is soooooo far beyond that it isn't even funny. In a DDoS attack the perpetrator doesn't even come to your system. A hacker has bots that he has infected machines with - users that don't even know they are on their system. These bots monitor an irc channel on a server out somewhere waiting for a command to tell them what to do. He could have hundreds or thousands of machines on each bot and could have 10-20 different versions of that bot out there. He then decides he wants to shut someone down so he send one 10-20 digit command to that irc channel that says slam this address - now those thousands of machines attack. So you have attacks coming from all around the world from many different ISP's. You shut down the ones that are attacking you then and the others are in line to get to you. Get all of em and they go to a different bot. Read the page that I linked to above and you'll get a better idea of what's going on. Steve Gibson is probably one of the #1 programmers in the world. You can also read this link - http://www.grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm . Bottom line is that you simply cannot trace some of these back to the origin without HUGE expenditures - like in the tens of thousands of dollars. Like I said - vBulletin.com which is the home site for the software that we run as well as Jack now had their site taken off line for over a month by DDoS attacks. I'm tellin ya - it's a scary world out there.

 

Glad you got the site back up Steve, Hang in there!!!!

 

Amazing what some people can do. Sad they feel the need to do it, but amazing nonetheless.

 

Agreed, Imagine what this person could accomplish if they used all that energy for something to benefit mankind.

 

Boy isn't that the truth!