Server Attack

Posted: Sat Oct 29, 2005 5:42 pm

Although our forums have been left open fopr your enjoyment we have had to tuen off some other functionality of the site due to an on-going server attack.
We are not at this stage aware of why this ddos attack has begun but are monitoring all trafic and back tracing all IP addresses in an effort to locate and ban the culprits.
Our dedicated and experienced server team are working flat out to resolve this and locate and report the culpit(s) to the authorities.

We aplogise in advance for any convenience but restricted functionality seemed a better choice than suspending the site completely until our enquiries had been completed.

Our server is currently recieving hundreds of page requests every few seconds and despite having excellent server resources, it is struggling to cope.

We look forward to returning to normal as quickly as possible.

Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 5:33 am

We have found the main culprit to be the Yahoo search engine bots (inktomisearch and slurp) - they were trying to index as many as 32,000 pages each which is really bad behaviour for a bot.

We will be contacting Yahoo for an explanation and if we do not recieve an adequate reply we will simply have to ban all their indexing bots from the site.