Posted on 11/10/2008 5:51:45 AM PST by Star Traveler
SAN FRANCISCO: Attackers bent on shutting down large Web sites — even the operators that run the backbone of the Internet — are arming themselves with what are effectively vast digital fire hoses capable of overwhelming the world's largest networks, according to a new report on online security.
[ ... ]
The report, which will be released Tuesday, shows that the largest attacks have grown steadily in size to over 40 gigabits, from less than half a megabit, over the last seven years. The largest network connections generally available today carry 10 gigabits of data, meaning that they can be overwhelmed by the most powerful attackers.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
Is this the kind of thing that Free Republic is encountering? What can be done about it? What are the methods for protecting Free Republic from these attacks we're getting?
I never did see a post or hear what happened over the weekend. Maybe so....
Was it an attack on FR?? It drove me nuts that it was down...but never saw an explanation as to the “why” or “how”.
it’s beyond top secret ...
FYI
I suspect that this was what the problem with Free Republic being shut down was...
Now I’m wondering what can be done to protect against these sorts of attacks, because, obviously, Free Republic will be getting more of them in the future...
We need a pool! Who’s for Jim spilled his coffee on his magical keyboard, or his dog chewed through the cord, or a UFO abducted it, or maybe it was Hussein’s brown shirts getting a jump on things?
I need to donate to FR more often. This is a national and patriot resource.
Chinese cyber attacks?
You said — “We need a pool! Who’s for Jim spilled his coffee on his magical keyboard, or his dog chewed through the cord, or a UFO abducted it, or maybe it was Hussein’s brown shirts getting a jump on things?”
Well, first of all, it’s clear that the ability to do this is there and it’s powerful and it’s big. That’s been proven and documented. Secondly, it’s very clear that what is posted here and the message that is being given to the public is not wanted or desired and there are those kinds of people (out there) who would want it shut down (and especially at certain times, perhaps). Thirdly, it’s *obvious* that there is a *lot of money* out there in Obama-land for doing all sorts of political dirty tricks. And, then fifthly, these big attacks that are described in the article are for hire to anyone who has the money to do it. These guys doing the attacking are simply mercenaries for hire and/or Internet pirates getting money by hook or crook (whatever means possible...).
So, it seems pretty clear that the primary thing that would cause Free Republic to “go down” at key times would be an attack of this nature funded by those who have the money to push their kind of politics.
Ping!
ping for later. Needless to say, I ran out of tinfoil on Saturday when I tried to access this site. What happened? And maybe more importantly, do we need to set up a plan “B” in case the unthinkable happens?
Tech ping!
You said — “And maybe more importantly, do we need to set up a plan “B” in case the unthinkable happens?”
Now, the unthinkable could be an outage from a few hours to a few days to permanently down (really unthinkable). In all these cases, the solution would be to have set up another method of reaching everyone on a central location and then referring them over to another site for continued communication while the board is down.
Right now there is another spot on Yahoo that Free Republic uses when the board has gone down in the past. It’s somewhat useful for letting people know what’s going on, but it’s not a good place for wide-ranging discussion, as it’s too tedious to use.
That’s at — http://groups.yahoo.com/group/freerepublic2/
Then there’s a “sort-of” sister board in Canada, called Free Dominion...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Dominion
I don’t know what the status of Free Dominion is now, but there are a couple of articles you might follow up with (and read...)...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Dominion
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56826
And then, I saw another board “pop up” during our last outage, and someone said we could all “meet there” while Free Republic was down (posting it on the “official” alternate Free Republic backup site on Yahoo)...
http://altfreerepublic.freeforums.org/
I really don’t know the full status or nature of these other sites, except for the one at Yahoo, which appears to be set up by Free Republic, itself.
It would be nice to have some kind of mailing list to contact all the members and posters in order to quickly shift them over to another alternate site. I would say, keep the mailing list updated and active and ready for some future emergency when contact of the entire membership is needed to shift over to another location. This would be the only way to keep the entire group together as that kind of “group” and shift everyone over to another temporary location (and perhaps a third and fourth location is we’re under continuous attack)....
Just my thoughts on the matter...
Twas a difficult day not being able to access my reality lifeline!
I will post that reply here, for everyone on this thread to read directly...
“Maybe you can give us an answer? I saw on the yahoo groups site that there was a hard crash and John had to go deal with it. Is all okay now? It seems to be running better.
Also, there’s a rumor here that you’ve been ill again. Are you okay?”
Yup, the entire system was down hard yesterday. We couldn’t even reach it remotely. It’s like we had no system at all, no DNS, nothing. John had to drive up to the data center to restart and debug it. After rebooting, he had to do some major diagnostic and forensic work, some debugging and network systems work, and finally got it up again.
Don’t know exactly what the error was that brought it down, probably a combination of things. We had a particularly nasty DOS attack last week and the system has not been fully up to speed since. Don’t want to start any conspiracy theories, but someone could be messing with us. Got a nagging feeling that not all the people of the world love us.
John will continue researching, refining and beefing up our systems and security. And we’ll also be ordering some new equipment that will help us recover remotely. We now have twelve separate servers up there and keeping them all running, all on the network and all synchronized is a bit of a chore. The next major hardware upgrade we make will include a replacement of all these separate boxes into one unit where the various processors are on boards that just plug into a big box. And when the big box is filled up, we can simply add another big box and continue plugging in more processor boards as needed. That should handle our growth to a few million concurrent users. After that, we’ll have some serious hardware growth issues to contend with.
We’ll also be exploring an offshore account somewhere, perhaps a mirror site for maximum redundancy, and maybe some underground networking. We’ll be encouraging a comeback of the local chapter networking system and encouraging our members to exchange email addresses and phone numbers with trusted chapter or group members.
On the personal side, I am fairly well. Still have the infection in my lower right leg and they’re treating it, but we can’t seem to get rid of it. But we’re managing. Just praying it doesn’t get worse and they won’t have to amputate it too. My blood sugar is under control. Diet and the pills are keeping it in the “good” range. Don’t have to use insulin. They’re also giving me pills for circulation, blood pressure, cholesterol, various dietary supplements and minerals and vitamins. They’ve discontinued the antibiotics. I take enough pills daily to choke a horse.
I have regained much of my strength and I’m now able to sleep at night. I can attend to most of my personal needs but still need quite a bit of Chris’ help with some things, like dressing, for example. I can now transfer myself to and from bed and in and out of the driver’s seat of the van and I can drive. This gives us some independence.
Sheila, John and Chris are all well.
Thank you all very much for hanging in there with us. We must all hang together or surely we’ll hang separately.
God bless.
This was at — http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2128703/posts?page=207#207
It could have been downloaded all the comments for use later in an Obama presidency...watch what you say.
They may be planning to shut it down before next election to keep FReepers from communicating...we need a back up plan...maybe a secret website that will be used only for that purpose?
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