Last night, an anonymous user joined the chatroom and told the members there (myself included) that he was attacking the server. This attack was easily thwarted by simply blocking his IP address, but he still managed to send nearly 7,000 requests to the server in the space of 10 minutes, knocking it offline for a short while.
I traced the IP to a church and school in Ohio, and sent an email to the operators of these organisations asking for an investigation. I suspect this was carried out by a student of the school, who thought it would be "cool" to take an "atheist" website offline.
Here is a copy of the email I sent.
I traced the IP to a church and school in Ohio, and sent an email to the operators of these organisations asking for an investigation. I suspect this was carried out by a student of the school, who thought it would be "cool" to take an "atheist" website offline.
Here is a copy of the email I sent.
Quote:To Whom It May Concern,
I am writing to you to let you know that last night at around 22:00 GMT, almost 7,000 requests were sent to our server in the space of about 10 minutes, all from the IP address 72.240.43.146, which I believe is used by various domain names owned by your organisation, including a school. At the same time, an anonymous user joined a public chatroom used by our organisation, and informed the members there (myself included) that they were attacking the server. They managed to take the server offline by overloading it with requests, but I was able to block the IP used (72.240.43.146) and the server quickly recovered.
Looking over the logs, it is clear that the attacker was running some form of malicious attack script, which tried various requests that were designed at either taking down the server or gaining access to the server itself. This type of attack is of course illegal, and though I do not wish to press any charges this time, I would be gracious if you could launch an investigation into this incident. As the IP is linked to a school, it may be that one of your students thought it would be "amusing" to try and take our server offline. I would not expect this kind of behaviour from an adult.
The server runs various websites, but the most prominent is AtheistForums.org, an organisation that promotes discussion between both believers and non-believers. I note that your organisation is linked to a church, and the school is religious in nature. Our organisation has no problems with the religious; indeed we readily accept religious members, and have both Christian and Muslim members of staff. AtheistForums.org is not an anti-religious organisation, nor is it a "pro-atheism" organisation; we have no specific agenda other than to create open dialogue between people of different beliefs.
Apart from AtheistForums.org, the server also runs numerous other websites, not related to religious discussion. These websites were also affected by the attack. I hope that you can shed light on this situation; as I said before, I do not wish to press any charges, as the attack was thwarted quite quickly and did not affect the server for long. That said, I would like the perpetrator to be found and reminded that this behaviour is illegal, and that attacking organisations whose beliefs your disagree with helps nobody, especially when our organisation is one which promotes discussion between people of different beliefs.
Kind regards,
Adrian Hayter
P.S. You may not be able to access our server, as the IP address 72.240.43.146 is still blocked, and will remain so until I can be assured that this event has been dealt with.
