Hi everyone.  At approximately 4:00 PM EST we had a temporary outtage for some customers.  I wanted to share some of the detais.

This is the report we received from our data center:

Some customers who were behind our managed firewall experienced network
outage due to DOS attack to individual IP addresses at 4:10 EST. 
Network engineers routed the IP addresses targeted, and
normal operation followed.

We have opened a ticket with our firewall vendor to investigate the
reason IPS did not catch this particular DOS. We will update you with
our findings as soon as we receive more information from our vendor.

What does this all mean?  Here is the short version... A DOS attack is when one or more computers send a flurry of communications to one destination with the intent of slowing down or halting the ability of a server to respond.  Our hardware firewall should of detected and stopped this attack but didn't.  Further investigation will uncover why the firewall device was unable to do it's job.

This DOS attack was not directed to Website Forge or one of it's customers, however some of our customers use that particular traffic route to reach their site.

The good news is that the attack has been averted and things are back to normal.  We had no software or hardware failures.  All great news.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience for the small segement of customers that were affected by this attack.  It sucks that there are "cyberterrorists" out there that feel compelled to cause trouble.  However, we will continue to protect ourselves from future issues.

Click here to read the definition of a DOS Attack

Thanks,
Shane Merem
www.websiteforge.com