Lions & Tigers & Hackers, Oh My!

Last week you may have noticed webbychat.com come to a screeching halt. This wasn't necessarily because we had tons of chatters (see upcoming post), but rather because someone from Brazil thought it would be fun to hit us with a Denial Of Service attack.

A Denial of Service, or D.O.S. attack, is when someone tries to overwhelm your server's resources either through repetitive connections or some other means.

Some of them are easy to spot, others aren't. It took as a while to discover:

a) That it was a DOS

b) Where it came from

c) What to do about it

What We Did About It

We immediately firewalled the offending hacker. Next we installed a series of security updates, and beefed up our defenses with secret things.

But what about my servers, you ask!

Well, this was targetted against webbychat.com. However, if you do have our javascript in the HEAD section of your site you may have noticed your page slow to load. You can solve this in the future by moving our code right before the closing /body tag. NOTE: If you move the code near the /body tag and have been experimenting with Page Slide the chat may not work properly unless you turn off page sliding.

For now, all seems well, but even the biggest sites get hit with these now and then. Thank you hackers from Brazil! Oye Como Se Va?