This is what a Denial of Service attack looks like...

[Angrboda]

A few years ago, a script kiddie DDOS'ed one of our ops for banning him (which he later asserted constituted our op "starting it"). Took out the ISP for substantial hours of the day on several days. That op has since been riding without a halo. People are such dicks.

[Reforged]

How likely is it that computers accessing this site have been put at risk?

[Jackalope]

How likely is it that computers accessing this site have been put at risk?

Not likely at all. DOS attacks typically involve flooding a server with bogus traffic so that it cannot service legitimate requests.

As part of the attack, they may attempt scripted exploits to steal or alter data, or other nefarious things. There's no reason to think that there is any risk to users accessing AF, based on what I know. Tiberius would be the authority on that.

As always, keep your antivirus, etc up to date.

[Tiberius]

How likely is it that computers accessing this site have been put at risk?

Not at all. All DoS attacks do is waste server resources.

[5thHorseman]

Is this a common occurence on all sites, or is it because we're special?

[Tiberius]

It's not a common occurrence. Sometimes it can happen by accident, but it's more likely this was a targeted attack. We actually get quite a few hack attempts every month; this is just one that succeeded in knocking the site offline for a few minutes. There was no server breach though; this was just a LOT of traffic to the server meaning regular requests weren't getting through.

[Faith No More]

Since we don't know for certain that we were the target, is it too early to play the 'poor persecuted atheists' card?

[catfish]

If you were browsing the forums earlier (around 17:20 UTC) then you might have noticed things got a bit slow for 5-10 minutes or so. At some points, the site wasn't loading at all. I contacted our host and very quickly they determined that there was a Denial of Service attack taking place against the server. The attack was blocked, and everything started to load quickly again.

Here is a graph of the server activity for the past 24 hours:



As you can see, we average several hundred incoming packets per second. At around 18:20 UTC+1 the number of incoming packets jumped to 21,307. This continued for about 20 minutes before it was detected and blocked.

We're still looking into the attack and where it came from, but I'll update you all as soon as I know more. We'll also make it a priority to look into server software to detect this kind of thing faster and log it properly.

- Tiberius

Goddidit...

[Tiberius]

Since we don't know for certain that we were the target, is it too early to play the 'poor persecuted atheists' card?

Our server was definitely the target. Yes, there are other sites on the server, but they are all either owned by myself or close friends. So unless someone was attacking one of those (unlikely), the attacker was probably trying to knock atheistforums.org offline.

[5thHorseman]

Since we don't know for certain that we were the target, is it too early to play the 'poor persecuted atheists' card?

No. This isn't the first time. Didn't you trace one back to a Christian group in the US, T?