Someone doesn’t like us.

Actually a lot of people don’t like us, but this is about one individual. This individual shall remain nameless as we don’t actually know their name. What we do know is what they tried to do, and that’s shut the site down using a cheap n nasty attempt at a DDoS attack. For those unaware what a DDoS attack is, it’s essentially flooding a website with so many requests that it can’t cope and falls over. We had this happen in the very early days of the site when we were on a shared hosting plan, and it was so bad that it took down over 100 other sites as well as us. We were very politely asked to leave and go find another service provider. Since then we’ve been on a dedicated host so we won’t take any innocent sites down if we do get attacked again.

Back to this attack though. Derek from aa419.org was able to fix this for us, and for that we’re hugely grateful. Here’s some of what we know about the attack. We know it was done by a Cameroonian, which is where all the recent fake sites selling nonexistent COVID19 PPE and cures are from. We know how they did it. We know how to stop it and how to stop it if they try it again. I personally know that the session we went through to deal with it isn’t like the movies and TV depict, with people sending each other viruses that put menacing messages on their screens or gliding through a VR world. In reality it’s a command typed in to see what’s happening and one to counteract it, rinse and repeat for over 2 hours, all on a black and white screen full of nothing but text. We know that we’re upsetting the right people if they’re going to this much effort in an attempt to stop us. One last thing we know. We know that we’re going to keep on doing what we do.