Denial of Service (“DoS”) attack
- Posted by e2 on 08.20.10
- Tags Site Review
Yesterday was a very difficult day for Yola and their customers. Yola’s servers were attacked unexpectedly and maliciously by as yet unknown individuals and/or groups, bringing down all of their hosted websites as well as their service provider’s entire datacenter.
The thing Yola cares about most is providing a world class service to all their customers, and doing so consistently and reliably. When their servers are attacked, your website is attacked. They don’t take this lightly. They worked around the clock to bring the service back up, and talked to you in their customer community forum, Twitter, Facebook and email during the outage to answer your questions and keep you up-to-date.
What was attacked? The IP address of their hosting service came under a vicious Denial of Service (“DoS”) attack, affecting all of their hosted sites. The attack consisted of an enormous amount of nonsense data aimed at their servers. With all of this junk flowing through it, it was impossible for legitimate traffic to get to your sites. Eventhough,your website is safe. It was secure during the attack, but impossible to get to (kind of like a roadblock). they’ve created another route to your site, and have been updating all the domains they control to use this route.
If you bought your domain from Yola or you use their yolasite.com subdomain, your site is already fully functional and you don’t need to do a thing. They’ve already done everything to move your site to the new address, and everything should be up and running normally.
If you bought your domain elsewhere (i.e. through a different domain registrar) and are pointing it to their service, please reconfiguring your DNS and pointing your domain to Yola.
This unfortunately happens to many companies on the web. There are just people who like to do malicious things. They’re not the first site to experience this, and they won’t be the last. They’ll continue to do everything possible to protect their service and their customers from these kinds of attacks in the future.
They’ve always had state-of-the art defenses in place; they split their networks up so that an attack on one part would not affect the other, and they bought special hardware to put in front of their sites. Normally these defenses were more than they needed. Not this time. They couldn’t have seen an attack like this coming, and what they had in place just wasn’t enough. They’re fixing this.
What will Yola do to prevent another attack of this nature in future? They’ve brought in a global web security firm whose expertise is the prevention and mitigation of incidents like this. They’re now creating the kind of protection usually reserved only for banks and government institutions to ensure this does not happen again, and will surpass that of most website hosting services.
