Mike Griffiths

I recently worked on and launched a website for a very large, and very well known global organisation. Within a couple of hours of the site being launched it was receiving thousands of unique visits every hour.

The website in question was quite busy, but the business it was involved in is quite light-hearted and probably not the most competitive in the world – not by a long shot.

This being said though, within a day of it’s launch the server was on it’s knees. After some quick tests and looking through the logs it was obvious there was a Denial of Service (DoS) attack going on. Not a very sophisticated attack, as I just added a few rules to the firewall to totally block it, but someone had still gone out of their way to attack the website from a handful of IPs from all around the globe. I traced the IPs and they came mostly from mainland Europe, each from various countries.

I find it quite amazing that someone has taken the time and effort to try and bring someone’s livelihood to it’s knees, for what appears to be no apparent reason. The website doesn’t have any real competitors so this attack seemed to be either totally random or an unprovoked malicious attack. Pointless either way. The site has since been running totally smoothly without a single hitch.