This email is going out to all of my hosting clients so I apologize for not addressing you by name.
Last night at around 9pm the servers came under attack via a DDos Request Attack (Denial of Service Attack). What this means is that someone wrote a script that would direct 1000’s of computers that were probably infected with malware to try and ping our server. The only thing a DDos attack attempts to do is make the servers unavailable. It is not out to collect information from websites or anything of that nature, simply just to bring a network to it’s knees. In this case it did. Myself as well as a team of network professionals are working on this to block the IP addresses that are driving this force at our network. We have yet to determine which website they were attempting to shut down and we probably will not know until we can get the server back up on it’s own and look through log files. I have been up all night working on this and have been able to get some of the IPs attacking the server blocked As of 10pm last night there were 100’s. Myself and the network administration team I have working with me on this will continue to work through today. What is great about the company that I work with to manage the health and wellbeing of my servers is that they have 24 hour support and a very knowledgeable staff that answers all of my questions. They have yet to fail me in the 8 years I have been with them.
Some of you are on private IP addresses because we have a secure certificate on your website, your websites are still up and running. One of the safeguards that I will be putting in place over the next few weeks is to spread all of you over several IP addresses so that if an issue like this happens again it will effect less of you. In the 12 years I have been doing this I have never dealt with an attack of this magnitude. Thankfully, because I take so many other safeguards, we have not lost any data, nor was any data breached.
Most of us have our email managed through Google Apps service which means that email is up and not effected by this issue. The rest of you are on your own email addresses with your own carriers so of course your email is not effected either.
I will continue to update all of you. I have set up a temporary website that I can easily post updates to from my computer and my iPhone. I will also further explain what a DDos attack on the website.
The location of that website is: http://jeradhillstudios.tumblr.com
I am truly sorry about this. There is nothing that I can do except try to block these addresses and hope the rest of them stop attacking. This won’t last forever. If you have any questions feel free to email me or give me a call. I will be in meetings from 11am until 2pm today.
