OK, who told the Chinese? Options

[Somey]

Apparently, our very own beleaguered Wikipedia Review has been under attack all month! By communists, no less! (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ohmy.gif)

Specifically, after being hacked on June 2, and our files restored on June 3, there was an additional, probably unrelated DDoS attack on WR during the period roughly between June 8 and June 10, emanating from Communist China. Our bandwidth usage shot up by nearly 70 GB in just three days... Our hosting company seems to have forgiven us for that, but on Monday (June 23), there was a further DDoS attack, this time from Russia, which compelled them to shut us down for a while.

Now, if I were a conspiracy theorist, I might suspect that hosting companies actually want these sorts of things to happen, so that it will provide them with a pretext to force site operators to "upgrade" to higher-priced services. Luckily, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I know a couple of guys who are...

So the good news is that there was practically no data loss whatsoever, contrary to what I'd feared. (Sorry for being so panicky about that...) The bad news is that now we're in the market for some sort of software to trigger a notification of some sort when the bandwidth demands of a particular IP reach a certain unusually high level. And we've got to get it up and running ASAP, before they try again. Someone has to have created something like that, surely? If anyone has any recommendations, please either post them in the WRR forum (if you're registered) or send us an e-mail (anticabal - aaatttt - gmail ddddoootttt com).

[Somey]

Aw, shucks!

Anyway, a quick update: After imposing domain-level blocks on the IP's (and secondary ranges) that had been spiking our bandwidth usage, it looks like we're now down to pre-attack levels of traffic - for now, at least. In fact, we're actually a bit lower than that, but that could probably be explained by people not realizing that we're back online, and/or deleting their bookmarks in frustration.

Also, I never meant to insult Chinese and Russian hackers, who are all supremely wonderful, smart, and above all sexy people, every one of them generous to a fault, who would certainly never, ever, ever do anything that might jeopardize the existence of what may be the world's only web forum devoted to criticism of one of the world's leading sources of Western cultural hegemony.

On the other hand, all that traffic could have come from a rented Chinese botnet being run by a teenager in Ohio. Who can say, really?

Maybe this would probably be a good time for me to start doing some of the stuff I've been promising to do around here over the last 2-3 months...