DDOS Attach on Maryland Shooters Forum

[Inconel710]

J and Crew,

Saw this posted on the Maryland Shooters Forum Facebook page tonight:

The site is currently suffering from an intense Denial of Service attack. I'm working with my host to bring it under control. Thanks for your patience while we work to resolve the issue.

And this was posted tonight by their admin, DD214:

Alrighty then. Sever load averages dropping and everything seems to be returning to normal. It only took me and the host 9 hours to get it stabilized.

This one was intense. Up until a few minutes ago some of the bots were even getting past the DDOS filter. I'm not sure how, but there were a handful of pesky bastards that had to be put down another way. CloudFlare is reporting that during a very short period we had 116,586+ threat hits from 208 different IPs from around the world. All were directed at the mdshooters.com URL rather than IP, so we were the target for sure. Someone doesn't want us talking.

They had to move their site behind a proxy server. I'm not saying it's going to happen here, but a tin foil hat wearer would be suspicious of the timing. The MD gun community has a big rally at their capital on February 6th.

Here's a link to the thread on their forum: http://www.mdshooters.com/showthread...=104465&page=1

[J]

Good to know. We have some DDoS protection in place, but I'll keep an eye out too in case someone does try an attack and figures out a way around the IPS/IDS system.

[bobbyfairbanks]

What does this mean? I have know idea what DDOS is or any of that other stuff means to me.

[00tec]

What does this mean? I have know idea what DDOS is or any of that other stuff means to me.

Distributed denial of service attack

Basically, automated computers start accessing the site so much and overloading the servers that genuine users cannot access the site. Notice how the site can be a bit slower when there's a LOT of traffic. Like that, but much worse.

[brutal]

IPS/IDS

Intrusion Prevention System/Intrusion Detection System

Think firewall on Deer Antler. They often run "proxy" services that can inspect the traffic in the data packet and ferret out the bad things before it gets to the back end servers.