Message from Kos, blog owner:
If you're wondering why the site is coming on and off intermittently tonight, it's because we're currently under a massive Denial of Service attack. Is it Conficker? Who the heck knows, but our load balancer is getting hit with about 200,000 simultaneous requests, and over 2 million in the last hour. IPs are being logged from Canada, Spain, France, and elsewhere.
Our server host is doing the best they can to fend off the assault, and since the site is currently up, it looks like they're succeeding, but things may regress at times. So bear with us while we fend off the attack.
I didn't file this under politics because this is probably not political. DailyKos is a big and popular blog. Lots of hackers would get a kick out of bragging that they took the big orange DKos down.
I don't think that it's a coincidence that this happened on the day of the big Conficker virus payload launch.
Hacking is big business and lucrative for the hackers who get away with pilfering cash from people's bank accounts, stealing and selling identities, and extorting websites to pay up so the hackers will leave them alone. I bet a lot of hacker hone their "skillz" on just being annoying, defacing websites, executing "look see" missions on institutions, spamming, etc. We ourselves at UrbanSwirl.com were hit by a virus that caused a pop-up to appear randomly to our visitors. That was a giant pain in the ass to get rid of.
I'm not going to propose any new laws or a "war on hackers", there are already enough laws in place that cover this sort of thing. I just wish some of this script kiddies would find something else to do. Go create the next Google or Facebook, go become a game writer or something. Just leave people alone. Hacking is costly, it took serveral days to track down and eliminate the virus infecting our website. In that wasted time I could have been doing a number of other things...advocating for world peace, cloning Obama so we can have smart presidents forever, exercising so that you can bounce quarters off my ass, blogging about Chris Brown and Rihanna, just all sorts of more useful things.
Sigh. I can only imagine the pain that the folks at DailyKos are going through with a Dos attack. I wish the good luck and much patience and coffee.
