Update 9:10am
The denial of service attack has now stopped and the extra restrictions we had in place are now removed. We are continuing to monitor the situation with our web hosting provider and will put back the restrictions again if the attack begins again to keep all sites running.
Update 6:35am
The StoreSecured service is experiencing a small denial of service attack. As of approximately 6:30am our hosting company has been able to mitigate the attack so that the websites can continue to run. However, we are currently running in a modified state and any semi-suspicious traffic will be blocked during the attack to ensure that all services continue running. Any IP generating over 10 connections will be temporarily blocked because this is the behavior we are seeing from attackers, ie many many connections from a single IP.
We will continue to monitor the situation closely and will remove these restrictions once the attack is no longer in process. Note that there are no security concerns this is a process to try and take the service down, ie overwhelm it with connections and not to break in.
Update 6:00am
We are currently experiencing a low level DOS attack. All sites and services are currently down due to a large amount of traffic overwhelming the server. Our hosting company is working on the issue at the moment and they expect a resolution shortly.
As soon as we have further information it will be posted here. It is interesting to note that 2 of the large payment processing vendors were attacked earlier this week, ie BluePay first and then Authorize.net yesterday.