If you missed the post from yesterday, please note that StoreSecured is experiencing a denial of service attack since approximately 11:00am yesterday 1/10 and we have been working to combat it and keep all sites running properly.
I’m adding this post to keep all merchants updated on today’s status of the attack.
Currently, we are still experiencing the attack but the measures put in place yesterday to mitigate it are helping and all sites are continuing to operate just running a bit slower then normal.
Sample Load Time Comparison
Normal response time average: 0.294 sec
Today’s response time average: 0.826 sec (with some extra large spikes at times)
If you are unfamiliar with denial of service attacks please note that they are fairly common in the network world and they hit all kinds of large internet sites, ie banking, social networking, payment gateways etc. A hacker or group of hackers flood a website with millions of requests from many different origins constantly in an effort to overwhelm the servers so that they are not accessible to normal users. We are fortunate to be hosted at Rackspace, one of the best hosting providers available, and they are working hard to get the attack under control. Once an attack like this has started there is nothing that we can do to stop it, we can just minimize the disruption and impact and wait for it to complete.
The majority of attack traffic is currently coming in Amsterdam and as a result we have blocked huge blocks of network addresses from Amsterdam and special rules have been put in place on incoming traffic. If you believe you are experiencing any odd site behavior that may be the result of this attack please contact us for assistance.
Any further updates today will be posted below. We appreciate your patience and understanding during this trying time, it is not fun for anyone.
Update 2:04pm
Sites have been running smoothly today even with the denial of service attack. The new rules in place to stop the hackers are blocking about 100,000+ requests each minute which is freeing up the servers to deliver content to our real visitors. Load time is still slower then normal but things are slowly returning closer to regular usage levels.