dos

In the very early hours of this morning, the AdultWork.com website suffered a DOS (Denial Of Service) attack which caused the site to stop functioning for a short period of time for it's members.

I was actually awake and on the site at the time that this happened, updating my AdultWork profile page there, when everything started to go a little bit crazy. Pages on the site became very slow to load, sometimes not loading at all, until eventually I could no longer access the site, no matter how many times I swore at my computer screen.

A couple of hours later, I went back to the AdultWork site to try and finish what I was doing and everything was back up and running as normal. The only difference was a short message from the owners, at the top-right of the page, informing everyone that they had been attacked and were in the process of taking preventative measures to stop it happening again.

"What the fuck is a Dos attack, anyway?"

Well, it's really quite complicated and technical to explain to anyone who isn't familiar with this kind of thing, but the Wikipedia website explains it simply as this:

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to, motives for and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally comprises the concerted, malevolent efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely.

Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically — but not exclusively — target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers; a pair of DNS Backbone DDoS Attacks, on October 22, 2002 and February 6, 2007, targeted DNS root servers, in an apparent attempt to "disable the Internet" itself by taking away an option of addressing Internet servers by their human-friendly names.

One common method of attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by:

* forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consume its resources such that it can no longer provide its intended service; and/or,
* obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.

Denial-of-service attacks are considered violations of the IAB's Internet proper use policy. They also commonly constitute violations of the laws of individual nations.

Or to put it another way, a Dos attack is nothing more than a terrorist type attack, conducted over the internet against a website, with the sole intention to stop that website from working.

Anyway, I've just gone back to check the AdultWork site and the message from the owners about the attack has now gone, so I would imagine that everything is now back under their control. Good on ya, AdultWork team...