Kerry's forum has been under heavy DoS attack recently

[NAO]

Last night it went down completely for about 30 min., and response times were very slow most of the night.

There is some idiot (or group of idiots w/one id) who is posting about 400 new topics per day (he going into day 3 of this). His topics are not blatantly trollish - they are erratic, oddball and frequently offensive. But he distracts the continuity of the threads, and he bumps real threads downward.

Right now the Kerry forum is down again. Last night it was a 'page cannot be displayed' time-out; tonight it is a SQL error.

I suppose it's a good sign that the repugs have nothing else left but crude DoS attacks, but it's annoying to have loss of service.

[Was_Immer]

1. DOS attack?

DOS as in the operating system DOS? I dont get it, never heard of this, please explain what a DOS attack is if you wouldnt mind

[TransitJohn]

2. Denial of Service eom

eom

[Was_Immer]

3. ah im a moron

THANKS

[aePrime]

7. DoS

DoS stands for denial of service attack. There are many forms of denial of service, and can mean many different things, but generally when people speak of it them they mean wasting all of a web site's bandwidth.

Most DoS attacks today are actually DDoS attacks, or distributed denial of service attacks. A single computer can not do much against a large web server, but crackers take over people's unpatched computers, install "zombie" servers on them, and then use people's little-used high-speed Internet connections to flood a server. It usually takes hundreds of machines for a DDoS attack to be effective on a decently-sized web server.

IP addresses are often spoofed (made up), but not really for protection, but to waste the time of the attacked server. TCP/IP (the protocol that basically runs the Internet, with some exceptions) has error-handling in it. So, this non-existent address contacts the web server, and the web server tries to reply to it, but it can't find the IP address. So, with TCP/IP's safeguards, it actually tries several times, and then finally times out.

[aePrime]

8. So, to reply to my own post

If you don't keep your computer patched, and you have a high-speed internet connection, you could be being used in DDoS attacks. Your computer may even be being used to send out spam! Keep you computers up to date with the latest security patches!

[Geek_Girl]

4. It's displayin SQL code now

when I visit the site. Someone's hacking it.

[AnIndependentTexan]

5. I wondered the same I haven't been able to get into it

[msongs]

6. working fine now and about all those short threads...........

all the ones I see are by dick bell the official guy. shoulda seen it the nights of the debates. deozens of little bitty threads with few if any posts.

Msongs
Riverside CA

[NAO]

9. Kerry's Main Page Works - Forum Does Not

Kerry's Website works fine
http://www.johnkerry.com

but the online forum just displays a SQL error
http://forum.johnkerry.com

[sandnsea]

10. That's the blog

The forum is a forum like this one. Two different things on two different servers.

[tomfodw]

11. Ah, I was afraid of that

When I couldn't get in.

I imagine they've tried to keep this person or persons from getting in and haven't been able to.