We were the target of yet another DDoS attack over the past few days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

The attacker(s) managed to bring the server down by draining it of all resources. I've been working with our hosting company on a more permanent solution since this has become a somewhat frequent occurrence.



Please let me know if there are any problems with the site, errors or other things not working properly.

Apparenty the russians are interested in whether a 205 tire will fit.

Thanks for protecting us, Andy! Really appreciate everything you do.

You are the best Andy. Thanks for all you do.

Wondered why it wouldn't load for a day or so... was having withdrawal symptoms!

Thank you, Andy.

Life is less enjoyable when 914World is down - a positive testament (or indication of addiction/obsession ).

May the perpetrators feel the wrath of the evils they sow.

But let’s appease them this once: yes, 205’s always fit-especially if you buy them by the shipload. Get a couple tankers full and we’ll buy some if you give us a good deal. . .remember, this is 914World, not BugattiWorld.

I just want to know when I'm getting my 1,000,0000,000 dollars when I answered the email. Anybody?

If they don’t have your bank account for direct deposit, you’ll have to wait for the check to arrive in the mail (USPS is a bit slow now, see other posts).

Thanks to SirAndy for getting site back up & running!

Thank you so much Andy! Have a blessed 2021!

Thanks Andy! When I couldn't access the site yesterday I just kept think how shitty it was that you had to deal with this on New Year's Day. I've managed servers in past jobs and know how frustrating this kind of crap is.

In fact, you may get a kick out of this. My first week as the new information manager for the ecology department at a major University, somebody hacked our mail server and started distributing porn with our email domain! That was fun

Thank you Andy.

I run the Amphicar forums and have had to set up multiple layers of defense. It is amazing the number of spammers and other a-holes who try to wreak havoc on a daily basis. It is one reason why there are fewer and fewer forums. Keeping up is costly and time consuming.

Thank you Andy

We appreciate EVERYTHING you do to keep us up.

My wife was starting to wonder why I was talkative.

Oscar

Phew! That is bad sign, Oscar - at least for me it is

Andy, Thank you for your effort and hard work to keep us going.
Andys

You are appreciated for all you do for us afflicted with the sickness Andy!

Great job @SirAndy

However, I think they are really after @IanKarr 's Bumblebee restoration Videos

Yes, thank you for everything you do @SirAndy

Thank you Andy for for all you do and have to do in this case.

Had no idea how addicted I was to the site till I couldn't get in!
I was starting to go into with drawl I think

Click to view attachment
https://eos.com/gallery/satellite-image-of-...-francisco-usa/

Thanks a bunch Andy. I knew you would be all over it. I wish we could zap these asshats.

Those Fucher's changed your avatar Andy.

It was a rough couple of days without my usual fix...I hope they didn't get anything sensitive in the process. Thanks for getting us up and running in short order!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

Nobody "hacked" the server, that's not what they were after ...

Thank you! @SirAndy

Great to know you're helping us maintain our virginity! Thank you Sir!

I'm just glad I was not the only one seeing that.

Just because I am paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't following me....

All the more reason we should be supporting the site and help @SirAndy out with keeping the front door open.
914World.com Forum Supprt
If you can and haven't yet, please do.

Thanks for saving us, again, Sir Andy.

chinese?

training their youth for cyber war on the west?

we are feeling their hate down here.
banned our wine.
banned our coal.
banned our barley.
etc.
all since christmas.


because we backed WHO looking into the origins of CoVid?

With all the hacker issues 914world has had over the years, I've often wondered why it's still "not secure" like it won't load as https:, and says not secure in my browser. -no ssl certificate.

I'm not sure if that would help this specific kind of attack.

One thing it does cause that seems odd is when Chrome browser puts it up on the homepage of frequently viewed sites, it won't click through because it defaults to https and https://www.914world.com oddly doesn't go to the site - it doesn't even redirect.

HTTPS does not make the site any more "secure", all it means is that the data is encrypted on the way from the site to your computer.

And since we're not dealing with sensitive information, unlike your bank for example, i don't see any reason to pay for a SSL certificate.

It literally does *nothing* to make the site less vulnerable to any of these attacks.

Andy you are an essential worker.
For all of us.
Thank you.

And here we are again, a distributed DDoS attack that started last night.

Lets see if i can hold them back this time.

Thanks for bringing it back.....

If only we could monetize that DDoS!

@SirAndy

What is the purpose of a DDoS attack on a site like this?

Looks like work with no gain to me.

Why is it worth their time to jack up a niche site?

Jilted scammer, competition, evil people, fat fingered information by a script kiddie, AI gone wrong, who knows...

Most of the time it's script kiddies. They are hacker wannabes that get their jollies jacking up sites. There is no monetary gain to be had here, so real hackers won't bother us.

My guess is they are probably doing a test run for some major attack on some valuable targets.
These are quite literally distributed attacks from thousands of hacked computers all around the world.

They're probably doing these tests to make sure they still have control over those computers before launching the real attack.

My college got hit yesterday and this morning as well. They ended up blocking several countries in order to stop it.

After 24 years I finally updated my servers to ssl last week, solely because many browsers do their best to not allow you to see old http no matter how non-sensitive the content. I get free certificates from the EFF and use the certbot to update the ssl certs automatically. I was surprised at how easy it all was. Pretty much four lines of instructions and that was done. This was on linux and apache2.

As far as the bad guys... I use a perl script to watch requests in the auth_log and when I cared the access.log for apache2. Somebody asks for something stupid I would block them from all ports in iptables. I don't really care about idiots on the webserver so I don't bother with it now but if they try to log in on ssh I block them from everything.

Even that won't protect you from ddos of course but at least it makes me feel good. I free them after a few days to keep the iptables sane.


Click to view attachment

Thank you for the reply.

Also THANK YOU for being our defense!

Seems silly IMO to target such a site as 914world.

Like mugging an 85-year-old woman!

I actually prefer to firewall off the outside world, only allowing HTTP and HTTPS to the server. Then forcibly redirect the HTTP to HTTPS. Any SSH access comes in from the internal network.

The problem with the IP based approach is that they have hundreds of thousands of different computers at their disposal. Each one having a different source IP. And that's before taking IP spoofing into account.

For example, last nights attack came from about 280,000 unique IPs.
Not sure your iptable would be able to handle that.

I've given up on IP based rejection or filtering a long time ago and moved on to other measures.

The one last night did catch me by surprise though as they have been changing their tactics lately.

This may be a silly question Andy, but why would they do this to you? Because they can?

Answered above:
http://www.914world.com/bbs2/index.php?s=&...t&p=3191875

Keeping hackers, spammers and script kiddies out of any IT system is like playing whack-a-mole. You legally cannot attack. All you can do is play defense and kill their attack when it pops up. If the government would allow us to make retaliatory attacks and actually go after them on their home systems without us get prosecuted, it would deter the hackers from a lot of their attacks.

But we are the good guys, so we can't.

This is disturbing...

The internet COULD be more secure if it was "fair".

This is something that should be looked into.

In a modern country the weakest link IS the Internet.

Take it out and chaos would result.

It SHOULD have oversite from an organization that can use ANYTHING to promote stability.

Setting up that organization might be difficult.

LoL and who would you trust to decide what "fair" means?

Hitting them back isn't an easy task by any means.
The days of script kiddies doing this in their parents basements are long gone.
Today, these attacks are run by organized crime and governments (sometimes one and the same).

And just to reiterate my point above, the computers these attacks come from belong to ordinary people who have no clue their computer/device is even hacked.

So you can't go after the individual sources of the attacks. You have to find who is controlling them. And that part is exceedingly difficult.