Midnight Blues
Well-known member
- Joined
- Dec 10, 2007
- Messages
- 830
- Reaction score
- 1
Welcome to Smokingpipes.com
As you probably noticed, our site’s been down. After some digging around it’s become evident that we’re responding to a distributed denial-of-service attack. A DDoS attack is best described as a multitude of compromised systems engaging a single quarry with the intent of flooding it with more information than it can handle. This information overload aims to “deny service” to legitimate users.
And while this explanation can get very complicated it’s easier to think that, essentially, our site was the subject of some unfriendly folks whose chief concern was to overload the site with mindless, superfluous traffic. It’s important to keep in mind that nothing about Smokingpipes.com has been compromised; all this extra traffic doesn’t harm the site, it just keeps all you customers locked out.
So, instead of allowing every bit (or byte) of our traffic into the store, we're forcing incoming traffic to establish its legitimacy. Simply adding a splash page with a link achieves that. It's sort of like putting a bouncer out front, who let's in everyone who asks nicely, but doesn't let anyone in who doesn't. That way, the bouncer is handling crowd control, rather than the nice gent in the store who takes time with each customer and can't say no to people, even if they're wasting his time though midlessly just standing in the store blocking the way for others. The analogy is a little tortured, but it's a rough approximation of how we're trying to differentiate the real traffic who really want to visit us (all of you) and the zombie traffic generated by the DDoS attack.
We appreciate your patience as we deal with this situation. Our website is available to you, as secure as always. In the meantime, we’ve extended the operating hours of our phone lines for your convenience to 10pm Eastern Time (GMT 0300).
Kindest regards,
Your Pals at Smokingpipes.com
888.366.0345
Enter Smokingpipes.com
As you probably noticed, our site’s been down. After some digging around it’s become evident that we’re responding to a distributed denial-of-service attack. A DDoS attack is best described as a multitude of compromised systems engaging a single quarry with the intent of flooding it with more information than it can handle. This information overload aims to “deny service” to legitimate users.
And while this explanation can get very complicated it’s easier to think that, essentially, our site was the subject of some unfriendly folks whose chief concern was to overload the site with mindless, superfluous traffic. It’s important to keep in mind that nothing about Smokingpipes.com has been compromised; all this extra traffic doesn’t harm the site, it just keeps all you customers locked out.
So, instead of allowing every bit (or byte) of our traffic into the store, we're forcing incoming traffic to establish its legitimacy. Simply adding a splash page with a link achieves that. It's sort of like putting a bouncer out front, who let's in everyone who asks nicely, but doesn't let anyone in who doesn't. That way, the bouncer is handling crowd control, rather than the nice gent in the store who takes time with each customer and can't say no to people, even if they're wasting his time though midlessly just standing in the store blocking the way for others. The analogy is a little tortured, but it's a rough approximation of how we're trying to differentiate the real traffic who really want to visit us (all of you) and the zombie traffic generated by the DDoS attack.
We appreciate your patience as we deal with this situation. Our website is available to you, as secure as always. In the meantime, we’ve extended the operating hours of our phone lines for your convenience to 10pm Eastern Time (GMT 0300).
Kindest regards,
Your Pals at Smokingpipes.com
888.366.0345
Enter Smokingpipes.com
