Last month I wrote about how my website was being attacked with a distributed denial of service. In the article itself, I purposely left some of the technical details out for a couple of reasons:
1. I presume that a majority of people are interested in personal finance information and aren’t interested in the technical details.
2. I wanted to make sure that my website was up and stable before I gave out specifics of how I stopped the hackers. (This is in itself a dangerous thing for me to do, because it gives them my playbook. However, the more I thought about it, the more I thought that others should have access to this information so that if their website is attacked, they have some assistance).
With that in mind, I reached out to my friend Evan Kline of 40 Tech and offered him a guest post on the topic. Some of the technical details are more suited for his audience anyway. He agreed and last night he posted it:
How to Survive Your Website Getting Hit With a Denial of Service Attack
Even if you aren’t into the technical details, there are some graphs there where you can see pretty lines showing the huge spike in traffic as well as a quote from my new hosting service WP Engine giving a magnitude of how bad it was.
Glad to hear that is out of the way and dealt with. Hopefully they did not have reason to specifically attack you, otherwise they will likely be back in some other form. More than likely though it was just some amateur hacker that wanted to be able to brag about bringing a certain number of sites down with his automated software.
I’m pretty sure it was a coordinated attack considering that they went after my MonaVie Scam, a site where I expose how the company is exploiting consumers. I had gotten threats before the attack, so it all adds up.
Wow LM! I don’t even know what I would do since most of that article was in Greek to me. I can see why a lot of these attacks are successful or at least VERY expensive to fight off (since I would have to hire someone to do most of what you did).
I never have been the victim of DDOS but I have been hacked pretty bad by the “Soliders of Allah” lol
You are SO full of $hit, you will do anything to drive traffic to this has-been website just so you can continue making money on the clicks. You don’t really care what you say as long as it drives traffic. A perfect example is this piece of garbage you just posted.
So by this comment…
Lazy Man says:
March 28, 2012 at 2:21 pm
I’m pretty sure it was a coordinated attack considering that they went after my MonaVie Scam, a site where I expose how the company is exploiting consumers. I had gotten threats before the attack, so it all adds up.
… you are saying that MV attacked you site.
First of all, get the hell over yourself. Coordinated attach hahaha, what moron. You are so full of yourself. If you only knew how little everyone cares about LazyMan. You can see it on your twitter and facebook sites, you’re basically talking to yourself, and everyone that follows you is another opportunistic vulture hoping to ride on your coat tails just like you ride on the coat tails of everyone you attack.
So in Lazy Man style, you elude to the fact that MV threatened you before this attack so it all adds up??? Can you please post these threats, and are they from MV??? or Life Vantage or One24 or Jusura or none of the above? You make it sound like the latter, which of course is your style, just like making a statement with a question mark is you style.
What this does prove that the majority of this hack blog is made up of this type of logic and innuendo and half assed statements hiding behind a fake question. It’s like me saying…
‘Lazy Man has not declared his income from this website to the IRS?’ Statement or question, we can let the readers decide.
This was once a really good financial site, it’s now a schlock half-assed hack piece of garbage.
I know you wont post this, but it’s meant for you anyway LM.
You Are Full of Crap,
I had received your comments before claiming that I lied about the DDoS attack and made it up. So now that I post the proof, you are upset about it. Looks like you just want to complain for the sake of complaining. Guess you can’t take it that I want to help people protect their websites from people trying to take them down. It’s not a good look for you to be against free speech like that.
If you read that bold comment, I don’t know how you come up with me saying that MonaVie attacked my site. I simply ask for someone to put together the facts. The site JuiceScam.com was attacked. JuiceScam exposes how MonaVie is exploiting consumers. MonaVie has threatened to sue me twice, even complaining that I rank too high in Google. That didn’t work so they told their distributors to avoid sites that are “negative”… in other words sites like mine that inform consumers critical information like 99.5% of people lose money. This didn’t work either.
So who has motivation to take down JuiceScam.com and who has repeated tried to do it through multiple methods? That’s what I mean about it all adding up. The threats I had gotten before were anonymous, much like this one – just someone attacking me because they are sore that I hurt their MLM business by exposing the truth.
I post the statement with a question mark, because while all the evidence adds up. We live in a world where law enforcement has not caught up to technology (at least for the little guy like me, the FBI would be different). The police have enough problems with crimes that occur in the real world, so I’m left posing the question and putting out the evidence and let the reader decide. It’s not like this site has too any other enemies other than MLM scammers.
If you want to lay out a question like ‘Lazy Man has not declared his income from this website to the IRS?’ you are free to. However, recognized two things:
1) Adding a question mark to a statement does not necessarily make it a question.
2) You have to have some kind of reason to believe I’m not declaring income from this website to the IRS. I’m not a lawyer, but I think you’ll find yourself on the wrong side of defamation with statements like that.
It’s an even better financial site now than it was before, because it addresses an under-served section of America, those being scammed by MLMs. There are still a lot of great personal finance blogs out there. I have a ton on my blogroll. I’m sorry that you are so upset about your MLM scam being exposed that you have to spread hate to me. If you think this website is a hack piece of garbage, then move along to another website. There are millions and millions to choose from. What I choose to do with my website isn’t any of your concern.
Look at that, I posted your comment. Oh and every comment I get like this just gives me more incentive to expose more MLM scammers. I guess you never learned the logic of “ignore him and he’ll go away.”
I clearly don’t understand my website enough (technology wise) as most of what you did before contacting any professionals went right over my head. I’d have had my IT mates on the phone in a heartbeat asking them for advice and what to do. I think I’ll ask my developer a few questions about our security after reading this. Before now a conversation regarding security would go like this;
Me: do we have security?
Developer: Yes
Think I need to be more in the know.
Thanks for the great posts regarding this issue and being so open about what is going on even with the potential risk to yourself for exposing your security methods.
Most people don’t have to understand their website that much. I do it because it is in my background a little bit (not my main specialty, but something I have interest in).
Most websites don’t try to expose scammers who seek retribution. I could write about saving money on pet care all day and its unlikely anyone would attack a website with such content.