Downtime today

I'm just getting back on now since this morning.These hackers really need to be publicly hung.Here we are in third world countries f*cking with people when  we need to be prosecuting chumps who attack the web.This type of thing is more of a threat than anything else.

A sunday afternoon with no LP is ROUGH!..lol

Let Murder Barbie take them all out.   (She'll do it as a professional courtesy, no charge.)

Update - Monday, July 16 @ 1:04 AM Eastern Time

Today our hosting company enlisted the help of a second company to fully solve the DDoS attack issues that were on-going Saturday and Sunday. 

LP had good performance Sunday morning and into the early afternoon, but by mid-afternoon the network went offline, presumably because our hosting company was installing the additional networking protection solution.  By around 6:30 pm Eastern Time, LP was back online, and going at full speed.  It appears to have been fully stable since that time, with one brief network drop around 11:00 pm.  (The network drop-out was around 10-15 seconds in length.)

So my fingers are crossed that we are finally past this difficult weekend.  I am happy with the networking protection company that our data center has added, as they have been around a long time and have an excellent track record.  It gives me confidence that any future DDos attacks will be quickly mitigated, with minimal impact, if any.

The only side-effect I have noted so far is that the first Web page you load when coming to the site appears to take an extra 1-2 seconds to load.  My guess is that the sligiht delay is the networking protection figuring out if you're a real human or one of the attacking computers.  But after the first page loads, future pages seem to load with no delay at all.  Hopefully once the attack stops completely, the initial 1-2 second delay will also disappear.

Thanks to everyone for your understanding and supportive comments.

i ran spybot last night because my cursor was acting quirky and it found a few normal stuff but 2 trojans that it couldn't erase because of files associated with them ( whatever that means), so i i'm running microsoft essentials full scan now and hope it will pick it up, but if not, i will have to rerun spybot again and hope it will get rid of it this time around. if not, then i will have to do what i did in the past by going online and entering the name of the trojans and figure a way to delete them. if none of this works, i may have to restore my computer to an earlier date and hope that solves the problem.

My recommendation for Windows users is to ONLY install Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), and to NOT install other anti-virus/anti-malware/anti-spam software (such as SpyBot, etc.).   MSE already takes care of any malicious viruses and spambots, and adding other software only creates conflicts on your computer and really kills performance. (Third party software also tends to delete harmless stuff that can actually make your Internet experience worse.)  No need for third party firewalls either -- the built-in firewall in Windows is more than enough.

It's completely up to you, but my personal recommendation is to uninstall all other "Internet Security" software except MSE, then reboot, and then do a definitions update and run a full scan.

Thanks Todd - For an Mac-user who is about to become a PC-user (tough transition - but work requires it) - I am guessing I need this info!

My recommendation for Windows users is to ONLY install Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), and to NOT install other anti-virus/anti-malware/anti-spam software (such as SpyBot, etc.).   MSE already takes care of any malicious viruses and spambots, and adding other software only creates conflicts on your computer and really kills performance. (Third party software also tends to delete harmless stuff that can actually make your Internet experience worse.)  No need for third party firewalls either -- the built-in firewall in Windows is more than enough.

It's completely up to you, but my personal recommendation is to uninstall all other "Internet Security" software except MSE, then reboot, and then do a definitions update and run a full scan.

thanks for the info. i have essentials on my computer and ran a full scan but it did not find anything, so i re-ran spybot and it deleted the two trojans it found. but i understand about the conflicts, essentials didn't find the two trojans and i had to get rid of them somehow. I don't like using multiple cleaning services but in my experiences essentials doesn't always find what spybot finds. in fact, there were numerous things spybot found which were less malicious than the trojans and cleaned them as well. It found Zedo, Iwingames, and different tracker programs.

What was the downtime for? I didn't have any activity until now.

I posted additional info about the downtime via Facebook and Twitter last night, so for everyone who did not see it, I'll repeat here what has been happening.

Yesterday around noon Eastern Time a massive and sophisticated distributed-denial-of-service attack (DDoS) started that affected not only our hosting company, but several others as well.  According to the data center management, it was one of the largest DDoS attacks that has been seen, and proved to be difficult to snuff out. 

Unlike most DDoS attacks that target a particular Web site, this attack was broadly aimed at a large range of IP addresses, affecting perhaps thousands of businesses.  Lottery Post was but one of the thousands affected.  The attack was sophisticated in that when the network engineers attempted to stop it, the attack would adapt and change.

Network engineers have been working since that time to chip away at the attack to fully stop it.  Although the attack was largely stopped by around 3:30 am this morning (Eastern Time), it is still continuing, and you may notice periodic slowdowns and momentary outages today.

This is the same kind of attack that brought down Twitter for a day recently.  These malicious attacks that ultimately affect YOU are the reason law enforcement should not "take it easy" on hackers who propogate this stuff.  It is the equivalent of bombing a building or cutting power lines.  These jerks cause real damage to hard-working people, and take away your ability to use Web sites.