When WAR is eminent... I was attacked!

Today is Wednesday, 3 days after one of the servers I was taking care of got attacked. To be honest, it's not even eminent, it's happening RIGHT now as I type this e-mail.

This is the other side of me which you probably have seen a little with my little Ben's Weird Discovery and me being my techy self. I was in a war - a cyber war.

It's just REALLY sad when people play STUPID - when they find that your server / business that's running on the server is doing well, out of jealousy, they ATTACK. Roping in an army of robots, computers to do whatever it takes to CRASH your server.

In the computer world, we call this DDoS. Distributed Denial of Service attack. It's a case when computers / bots overload your server with requests to a point where it just freezes, jams up, goes into cookoo mode and stops other REAL customers / web viewers from entering. This thing is RAMPANT. In fact, not only small servers like mine get hit, big ones - mega huge ones like that of Microsoft's or even Google's get hit. Remember the day when Microsoft's Windows Update site was completely down? Well, that's DDoS.

So back to where I was at, my server was hit - it started with a small number of bots and users attacking then as my server withstanded the hit, it became bigger, stronger almost as thought they were calling for reinforcements. I've had sleepless nights, constantly on the phone with my counterparts abroad and constantly finding ways to KILL this attack.

The war is not yet over but we're holding up. May the attacker rot and die. :)

Sorry, I just needed a place to place my thoughts of the day. Okay, I'm back to my jolly old self again - ice cream anyone? :)