TPM Victim of DDOS Attack

“Blogging Research Wordle” by Kristina B is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

TPM Victim of DDOS Attack

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall confirms that his site has been down since 5 pm owing to a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack.

James Joyner

September 9, 2011

Comments

Talking Points Memo‘s Josh Marshall confirms that his site has been down since 5 pm owing to a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. Presumably, this is related to TPM’s publication this morning of a story titled “Anonymous Unmasked: Mugshots of the Faces the Feds Say Are Part Of The ‘Hactivist’ Group.”

Good luck to Josh in getting up and running soon. This is an outrageous, if unsurprising, attack on the free press.

9 responses to “TPM Victim of DDOS Attack”

Neil Hudelson

September 9, 2011 at 9:02 pm

Speaking of possible hacks…when I clicked on the “Egyptian Protesters Attack Israeli Embassy” link from the homepage, I was redirected to a site with the address (DO NOT CLICK) “http://facebinks.com/ads.php” (DO NOT CLICK!) and a very large advertisement for a free ipad 2. When trying to navigate away I was repeatedly stopped. Just an FYI. I have a screen shot of it if helps at all.

I had no other sites running btw, but its not impossible that its just my computer infected.
James Joyner

September 9, 2011 at 9:33 pm

@Neil Hudelson: Ugh. None of my ads are supposed to pop over content, but some of the networks don’t do a good job of policing. And different users get different ads, making it very hard to investigate/replicate.
Neil Hudelson

September 10, 2011 at 12:47 am

No worries. Stellar content makes an occasional stubborn ad worthwhile :-).
Christopher Bowen

September 10, 2011 at 1:40 am

Let’s not forget what we’re largely dealing with. It’s a DDoS. This is the technological equivalent of a spitball fight. A potentially devastating one, but these are not as sophisticated as people make them out to be.
James Joyner

September 10, 2011 at 7:28 am

@Christopher Bowen: Sure. But they can take down sites for hours, sometimes days, and cost money to fight. Additionally, sites on shared hosting are often booted altogether when they come under a DDoS because hosting companies don’t want to fool with them or risk the wrath of their other customers.
Janis Gore

September 10, 2011 at 2:37 pm

I had that, too, Neil. So it’s not just you. It came up only once around 11 a.m.(?) this morning.
Davebo

September 12, 2011 at 1:00 am

Additionally, sites on shared hosting are often booted altogether when they come under a DDoS because hosting companies don’t want to fool with them or risk the wrath of their other customers.

Then you are using the wrong host. DDoS attacks can be thwarted fairly easily by competent hosting companies. Cheap hosting brings lousy service.
James Joyner

September 12, 2011 at 6:57 am

@Davebo: Cheap hosting is all most sites can justify. I started OTB on an $8/month shared host (HostingMatters) and kept it there for quite some time. I’ve gradually ratcheted up but it’s very expensive when you get into dedicated servers with adequate support. And I had horrible experience even there with RackSpace, which is outrageously expensive and still couldn’t handle the traffic.
Christopher Bowen

September 12, 2011 at 12:17 pm

@Davebo: James is right. There’s a noticeable jump between paying for shared hosting and getting a private server with support. A VPS (virtual private server) can mitigate some of those costs, but I’m not a big believer in them.