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Astronautix Taken Offline due to DDOS Attack

Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2011 5:28 am
by djolds1
http://www.astronautix.com/

Due to a persistent denial of service attack, astronautix.com has been taken off line.

Thank you for your support over the last 17 years. I'll have to consider in what altered media, form, or other hosting arrangement the content of this site may reappear in the future.

Per aspera ad astra

Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2011 6:14 am
by Betruger
Any idea who's responsible for the DOSA?

Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2011 6:20 am
by Giorgio
This is absolutely crazy nonsense. Who in the world could have interests in DDOSing astronautix.com? :?

Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2011 10:46 am
by Skipjack
This is absolutely crazy nonsense. Who in the world could have interests in DDOSing astronautix.com?
Exactly! Just shows how stupid and moronic these people are that conduct such nonsense! I wished they would rather put their talents to good use and do DOSA on those websites that promote themselves via the tons of spam on the web, mainly online pharmazies and online casinos.
But who can understand what is going on in the mind of a guy who DOSes astronautix...
Just unbelieveable!

Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2011 12:48 pm
by Scupperer
While I wouldn't expect much of a response, report it to the FBI, as it is a crime.

Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2011 3:47 pm
by KitemanSA
I wonder if this is someone who wants an auto update every year and typed in 1ys so is was getting one every yacto-second.

Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2011 4:04 pm
by kurt9
That's too bad. Astronautix was the best space history site ever.

Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2011 5:02 pm
by ladajo
Now this truly sucks, and the hosting agency could not give any info on the sourcing of the attack?

WTF? What idiot would have any possible thing to gain from this...

Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2011 5:29 pm
by ScottL
Find a host with ping protection, an IDS running, and if you have the money get round-robin cluster hosting which divides your page views among a few servers instead of just one. EX: If you get 100 views a minute across 5 servers, that means every server is handling 20 requests per minute. When a DDoS attack occurs the attack is spread across several servers instead of 1 server that will be saturated by requests.

Just some thoughts...

Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2011 7:03 am
by GIThruster
and please do report it. USG makes a lot more arrests for this sort of thing than you'd guess.

http://www.cybercrime.gov/

Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2011 1:46 am
by hanelyp
ladajo wrote:Now this truly sucks, and the hosting agency could not give any info on the sourcing of the attack?
That's the nature of a Distributed Denial of Service. The attack is launched from bots all over the place. And most of the people whose computers were used probably have no idea.

Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2011 1:57 am
by krenshala
ScottL wrote:Find a host with ping protection, an IDS running, and if you have the money get round-robin cluster hosting which divides your page views among a few servers instead of just one. EX: If you get 100 views a minute across 5 servers, that means every server is handling 20 requests per minute. When a DDoS attack occurs the attack is spread across several servers instead of 1 server that will be saturated by requests.

Just some thoughts...
While this does help, it usually isn't enough unless the attack is of very low volume.

Most of the time the problem isn't with the server being able to fulfill all of the malicious requests, but the fact that all of the malicious traffic has saturated at least the server's network connection, if not the host's (depending on the size of the attack). I've seen DDOSes range from ~100Mbps (barely enough to take down a typical server network connection) to 5Gbps+ (more than enough to bring a smaller hosting provider down until the traffic is null-routed by the hosting provider's access providers (the big names in the Internet)).

Either way, its rediculous that someone would target that kind of website. I also recommend reporting it, or having the hosting provider report it (if they haven't already).

Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2011 7:29 pm
by zapkitty
The original version, not updated since Oct 2001, but still live

http://www.friends-partners.org/partner ... aceflt.htm

Or, the wayback machine has a snapshot from October of 2010:

http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http:/ ... nautix.com

Details of the attack would be useful if Mark Wade can spare the time to provide them. Actual DDOS or just an accidental DOS?

Had an accidental DOS once... a government archive had put up a pdf on the relationship between the Soviet missile design bureau and the Soviet manned space program but the archive interface had been privatized and was a proprietary corporate clusterfuck.

People running a variety of OS's couldn't get at the file so I tossed a copy on a small file drop I hosted to the few people I knew would be interested... and then spent the next couple of days wondering why LLNL had launched a DOS attack on my file drop :)

Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2011 8:16 pm
by Giorgio
zapkitty wrote:People running a variety of OS's couldn't get at the file so I tossed a copy on a small file drop I hosted to the few people I knew would be interested... and then spent the next couple of days wondering why LLNL had launched a DOS attack on my file drop :)
Funny one :)

Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2011 3:45 am
by IntLibber
ya if someone say, at slashdot did an article on some space topic and linked to an astronautix image, that would DDOS the site.

On the other hand, spammers are doing DDOS a lot to try to compromise SQL databases and test for various sql injection methods, as a means of posting spam links to their sites once they figure out a working injection method.