Of course that sent me into dizzying interrogation mode to find out – who was the intended victim of this attack; which sites were attacked; and the big one: why?

Our techs let me know:

No one account was causing these issues, rather it was a coordinated, distributed attack against multiple sites on the server.

Who was the target?

Random sites on the server’s primary shared IP were targeted. These attacks do not often target random sites such as this attack did…

That means that random sites on our server were attacked.

How to Stop the Attack:

We have placed a hardware firewall in front of the server, and malicious traffic is being mitigated. 

It is stopped but the server will likely remain under attack for the next few hours.  The techs at HostGator are actively monitoring the sites.

Who did this?

As the attack’s true source is hidden, there is little we can do to discover the cause of the attack.

Unfortunately it is unlikely we will ever know.

Conclusions

Unfortunately being a webmaster and owning a website comes with a certain amount of risk.  The ‘bad guys’ are out there seeking vulnerabilities and just generally wreaking havoc (similarly to our offline lives).  We keep up with all the best practices, security enhancements and monitoring that is available to us.  But just once in a while someone becomes the victim.  This was one of those times.  Because of excellent monitoring, backups, and 24 hour technicians, our downtime was minimal and any real damage was prevented!

This should be an excellent reminder to keep your sites backed up and up to date.  Out of date software is the number one cause of vulnerabilities online!  So please – keep your WordPress, plugins and themes up to date!

Questions?  Leave a comment or drop me a line at cathy at desperatelyseekingwp dot com.

As much as I love Heather – (in fact the domain name was why I started reading her blog – how can you not feel a kinship with someone desperately seeking sanity?) – I’ve purchased a new domain name to go with my tagline: your friendly geeks.

Now, comes the difficult part – re-branding!  Dianne and I put our heads together and have some options.  But I want to know what y’all think.

Which do you like?  But even more helpful – will be if you can explain WHY you like it?

black & pink geek-glasses

black & pink geek-glasses script

earth-color distressed

grey & green glasses

tri-color smile

Thoughts?  Critiques?

It’s an idea.  An idea that a few kids, ok, 20-somethings –  can make a difference in the world.

Let me back up a bit.  When I was a teenager, my family moved to Zaire for three years.  Along with the other diplomats’ children and missionary kids I attended a boarding school.  Among my roomies were were Swedish, Norwegian, Zairian and American girls.  I am Canadian.  During those formative years I lived in a veritable United Nations of schools.  On Fridays, the flower ladies came from the village and we batted our eyelashes at our latest crush to get flowers. Saturdays we trekked into the village for deep-fried slices of cassava, and coconut milk out of the coconut.  We climbed trees and picked ripe guava and loquats; we grumbled about locust season and homework.

In my generation, my childhood is unique.  But for this millennial generation, it isn’t so spectacular.  Kids nowadays are far more integrated into the world as a whole.  My kids go to school in a United Nations of cultures while we live in Canada.  But in any generation, we grow up wanting to make a difference.  We want to be firemen, superheroes or doctors.

An amazing example of the millennial generation’s optimism and solidarity is this story I just watched.  It started with a 20-something in 1996 who was going to change the world.  His dream was to take down the number one International War Criminal Suspect.

In his words,

Money and power used to dictate stories, lives… opportunities.  Now it’s bigger than that.  People of the world SEE each other.

What happened next, is astounding and has already rippled through millions of viewers.  These young people started a social media movement.  They have pressured the US government into action not because of any financial or political gain, but because of the masses of supporters.  And people are getting on board faster than ever – its gone viral. 

You’ll get goosebumps watching this – not only is it an amazing cause (you have to start somewhere and why not #1?) but it is the power of our youth – our new system – our inter-connectivity as a human race.

My skeptical side, immediately wanted to know – what does he gain? Is it for real? Can these young people handle a viral campaign and stay true? See their answers to similar critiques that have been published.

And visit the KONY2012 Website to simply sign your ‘pledge’ (not financial) to support the campaign.

Are you still skeptical?

Here’s my quick summary courtesy of Mashable and TechCrunch.

Anti-SOPA crowd says: this will allow legislation that will allow censorship.  We would all agree that there are some sites that simply shouldn’t be online – I’m thinking of my kids and freaks out there who like to exploit them, as one example.  However, the end-game means that website owners would become responsible for the content on the site, which in turn means no user-added content (how can we control what comments our readers add?), which in turn could threaten the entire social media and social network infrastructure.

Proponents say: a serious threat exists online to the entire US Copyright system.  Without some action in the form of legislation, jobs and income will be lost and the fine arts industries will suffer or die due to online piracy.

Click on Graphic to view the original.

SOPA STRIKE

Tomorrow, January 18 American Censorship is organizing a ‘black out’ day.  Websites such as wikipedia, reddit, creative commons, google, mozilla all support this cause.  I know reddit and wikipedia are going completely black tomorrow with a message directing readers to American Censorship for more information.  I wasn’t able to see promises from the other sites.  In November the first ‘blackout day’ was held, and over 6,000 sites participated with a “STOP CENSORSHIP” black bar across their logos.

If you’d like to participate, visit this page for ways you can particpate.  The blackout begins at 8AM EST and goes for 12 hours.  If you need help adding the plugins or javascript to your site let us know.  We’ll be donating as many hours as needed tonight to help website owners install the blackout page.  (& remove it tomorrow night)

Further Reading

http://savvyblogging.net/sopa-strike/

http://americancensorship.org

http://mashable.com/2012/01/16/murdoch-twitter-rampage-sopa/

So, are you striking?