Over the past few days, Fine Tuned Mac has been under a sustained DoS (Denial of Service) attack. The attackers have been attempting to knock the site off the Web by bombarding it with spurious traffic, sending so many requests that the server can't keep up with them all (and drowning out legitimate traffic).

This attack has led to slowness to load pages and to errors like "500 Internal Server Error" and "site not found."

I'm working with the Web host to see what we can do about the attack. In the meantime, please be patient with us. The attackers have proven to be quite persistent.

I first ran across the problem only a few minutes ago..."Server not responding", but why on Earth would FTM be under attack? (Rhetorical question?)

I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary until just now — but, remember, I'm on dialup. (Maybe 'slow' is a good thing under such circumstances?)
Other than the simple reason, "Because they can", it'd be interesting to know why FTM would be targeted for a DoS attack and by whom. Is FTM a threat to Chinese hackers or their ilk?

Weird that there's no obvious motive. Usually these things are either retribution (you piss off anyone recently?) or extortion. (received any demands for money recently etc?) Very strange to just come out of the blue.

If you're being hosted, maybe someone is attacking the host and you're just in the crossfire?

All my sites are under a DoS attack lately. My site at morethantwo.com has been knocked off the Web repeatedly in the last few days; so has my site at franklinveaux.com. Basically, all the domains that list me as the contact person are getting hammered.

It seems to be related to a group of malware writers I helped put in jail some years ago. They're back out now.

Go get 'em again! Is there any way FTM folk might be able to help 'castrate' the malefactors?

They may be violating the terms of their parole if, in fact, they've been paroled.

Just out of curiosity, did the authorities alert you of their impending release?

Nope! They're in Estonia right now; they weren't arrested in the US.

I suppose a month of a DDOS protection place like cloudflare is costly?

I've been looking into DDoS protection, and yes, it does tend to be a bit spendy. The attacks launched against us seem to have been mitigated, at least for now.

I've heard that a number of the "private bit torrent trackers" have been under more-or-less continuous DDoS attacks nonstop for the last half year or so. Guess the RIAA/MPAA/BSA don't mind getting their hands dirty either.

And I wonder if we'll always have problems with people being able to DDoS / botnets?

As long as people use computers but don't understand security, there will always be botnets. Welcome to the future!