Were we attacked?

reply to post by The time lord


I was hacking the server then BOOM! Succcess!! JK





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www.abovetopsecret.com...
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Mulligan


[edit on 30-10-2008 by 12m8keall2c]

[edit on 30-10-2008 by schism85]

Whew!!! Thought I had been banned there for a moment! Glad to see that I'm only on the "watch list" LOL

it said it was undergoing maintenance at one point...

was this an attack, though?

[edit on 30-10-2008 by adrenochrome]

Error code 132 is gone now (obviously) but there are still glitches.

First, prior to login there's NO ATS current events. The page is there but all the data is gone, black.

Logged in under BTS.

Now, there's current events and BTS topics on the current list.

The usual ATS topics are not there in current events.

While under ATS the upper left icon that links to ATS (from BTS etc.) is a blank icon.

edit typo
edit UPDATE - All back in usual working order. Thank you!

[edit on 30-10-2008 by Trexter Ziam]

[edit on 30-10-2008 by Trexter Ziam]

Could have been a rapture moment, better than the Governments creating Marshal law on the internet. Thought I was banned for writing about the Bible, or was that illuminati bloodlines the last wording that did it?

SO usually drops by in due course to let us know what happened.

I had been looking at the Amazing pics thread when it went.
Crossed my mind as it went that someone didnt want them to be put on.
But I think the pics if they do get put on wont be as amazing as the claim but I'll happily take being proved wrong.

Originally posted by SkepticOverlord

Originally posted by schrodingers dog
Man I am impressed how quick you guys resolve these issues.

SkepticOverlord:
Thanks. We know that ATS has become an important part of the daily routine for many people.

Also... I like to get this stuff cleared up quickly so I can have a life for a brief portion of the day.

Glad you are wearing the Super Hero costume, it fits you well and your words are so so sweet, I appreciate you more than you know...

Thankyou, I did not want to loose both of my favorite sites in one day, I would be in shock and utter dismay.

[edit on 30-10-2008 by antar]

Okay guys I know Skeptic has not got back on this latest one,

I know before they said in recent times this is just "Database Problems" etc, and probably nearly every single time it is, computer’s eh, especially with the new traffic ATS is getting.

But in all honesty I am not sure they would tell us if it was due to an attack.

I cant blame them, we have to be honest ATS is a growing Commercial operation now, and to admit this is due to attacks would affect Advertising Revenue and also "Confidence" etc in the LLC and future deals.

So I think everyone should think on that .

I Do Know Something.

When this first happened last night at 22.16 GMT I was also logged into one other similar site, and also two other that did not require log in.

They all went down at the same time, especially the story about the RAND corporation.

I rebooted my router, ATS was still gone but the other sites were back up,
but in Prison Planet when I went to the RAND story the site was down but my connection was closed repeatedly, I had a massive attack on my firewall and Firefox kept crashing whenever I went to that Page.

This happened and I have no doubt at all they are linked and probably to that story, for about 15-20 mins yesterday just after 22.16 you could not get that story to load on Prison planet, Icke Break News, Red ICE, and others.

The other links worked, the other sites were fine until you tried to load that page, and on each different site, all in different countries they would crash firefox and also intrusion attempts.

I txt a friend in my country, IE crashed on him when following the link at 22.24

I then called a friend in Asia same there, firefox though, he got the page loading but the graphics wouldn’t load the picture when he tried to view the image his firefox crashed (image of jet). Now I know there is concern that JPEG and GIF etc can be used to carry virus's and it is a bit of a loophole in internet security, so maybe that was the source etc of the problem.

Turned of my PC and router till this AM then :-).

I really think this was a concerted effort, but as mentioned above I’m not sure if we could ever know the truth due to operational reasons, and real life economics.

I would like to say though that we can Trust ATS on 99.9% of issues but in these cases I am not sure if we would be told.
AS IBM were the computer company for the Nazi’s lets be a bit realistic about cyberspace eh guys?

Kind Regards,

Elf

May I express my suspicion that the attack might have come from some just pushed back on the Quantcast Rank List or worried they will be soon...

Originally posted by SkepticOverlord

Originally posted by defcon5
Seems like this is becoming a common occurrence in the early morning hours.

Those who would scheme to attack would certainly do research as to when is the appropriate time (like when Bill is normally sleeping). But thanks to very-loud cellphone ringers, no downtime goes unnoticed. (Actually, Mrs. Overlord elbowed me asking what that damn noise was)

Star and Flag for Mrs. Overlord on a job well done

Originally posted by MischeviousElf
Okay guys I know Skeptic has not got back on this latest one,

Last evening's downtime was caused by what appears to be a "perfect storm" of unpredictable (and predictable) events.

At some point, the Yahoo "Slurp" indexing spider latched onto our old tags page... even though I have a specific "Disallow" statement in our "robots.txt" file to make sure search spiders don't parse those pages (since we disabled the tag system). And for some reason, Slurp decided to hit about 6-9 different tag search results every second... a heavy load on a reasonably high-load search. (I have no idea why Slurp hit those pages, ignoring our robots.txt declaration, and at a previously unheard of rate of access. We keep logs of search spider activity, and previous logs show a hit-rate of no more than one tags page every five seconds from Slurp... and yes, it was from a valid Yahoo IP.)

And... at that same time, we were also servicing a peak in a heavy cycle of indexing from an AOL spider, as well as an MSN spider (all these non-Google search spiders tend to increase their activity near the end of the month... I've just never seen them all increase their rate-of-index at the same time.)

And... at that same time, our service provider's load balancer (that balances the activity among our three web servers) had a brief failure that caused "service unavailable errors" for a time.

And... as is typical of life at ATS, when the site runs slow or has downtime, lots-and-lots of people are hitting refresh in the hopes that it will come back. But most people don't realize that if you refresh a page that's responding slowly (at the server), your action doesn't stop the server from delivering the page, it just initiates another process for the same page... and continuing to refresh just introduces more and more process to a server cluster already struggling to recover.

As a result... the database server was attempting to respond to roughly 500 queries a second... while we've survived intense traffic peaks that were in the range of 180 queries a second, 500 is an unexpectedly high rate for any database installation.

And... as it was necessary to take all services offline and reboot the database to allow everything to recover, minor corruption crept into a few database tables, causing another slow-down, and some extended downtime to repair.



It should be noted that every site with web servers on the Internet has multiple attack attempts on a daily basis. experts estimate that about 8% of all Internet traffic is the result of automated bots that are constantly looking for servers with weaknesses, and attempting to exploit anything that is discovered. When and if an attack/exploit occurs, it's rarely the result of a specific site being targeted. While we have indeed been the target of malicious attacks in the past, and one recently, the reality is that only a handful of attacks over the past five years have been the result of obviously targeting ATS.



Now... whether or not this particular odd confluence of unexpected and errant search spider activity is the result of TPTB, I'll leave that speculation up to our members.

Thanks Skeptic,

In retrospect,
I wasn't being critical of anything you guys do, or bringing any similarities to IBM and ATS just mentioning the reality of cyber world per se & just musing.

Wow I am amazed at the technical abilities and knowledge of you guys, Computers are soo far from a strong point with me it's ridiculous!,

I am still trying to understand what you explained, but not due to your prose, but my ignorance on this.

However your post did get me thinking, and maybe some here who know of these things could enlighten me.

Well all countries have armies of people, surely certain countries remaining unnamed without any real technical abilities could do this, if 1 or 2 million people at PC's used a Yahoo search for the same page or subject at roughly the same time would it possible like in denial of service attacks to achieve what happened.

Just lots of people basic PC's, hell these days i phones, all on various search engines and GO, to that same page or topic.

Not even with any technical or tracable attacks as nothing would seem out of the ordinary.

Now if such a thing could happen, do the search engines log or have access to the geographical locations of the queries like a geographical google Trends.

Just a thought maybe deep bunkers and guys typing 0 & 1's and old C and stuff, whatever the method's of hacking is not even needed.

I also thought if members are logged on to ATS and their PC has been infected with anything malicious is that a slightly open back door to do this sort of thing to ATS if such an attack like in the past did take place?

Kind Regards,

Elf

Back to trying to decipher What it all means, lol god BB code is enough of a headache for me.

This is a different event, did anybodys computer just shut down? Could be just mine but it rebooted on ATS it has occured in the past too.