Survivalblog Update! Under DOS Attack

You can still Access Survivalblog by going to either:

http://64.92.111.122/ [U.S. Server]
http://95.143.193.148/ [Swedish Server]

Below is the Response I received from James Rawles this morning. I included my letter to him at the top (Above his response):

-JJS

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James,

I’ve gotten emails and forum posts about Survivalblog being down. Is everything okay? Is it benign, or is there something I need to get out to the listeners? Any updates would be helpful, as the bulk of RFR’s listeners are also Survivalbloggers. They’re concerned and many don’t have any way of finding anything out except through RFR. And we’re in the dark just as much. Thanks.

God bless,

-John Jacob Schmidt

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RESPONSE FROM JAMES RAWLES (Received 7:32AM Mountain):

John:
This weekend, our server in Sweden was put under a “ping flood” Denial of Service (DOS) attack that resulted in 65% packet loss at times.

This attack was most likely orchestrated by the man in Texas who last week anonymously sent me a racist rant and threats against both my blog site and my books. (His e-mail began: “You ni**er lover you have five days to take all links and any [sic] metion for [sic] links below off your site. If you [sic] dont [sic] do it I will post [sic] everyone [sic] of [sic] you [sic] cr***y books on [sic] prirate [sic] sites and kiss your ni**er loving income from them good [sic] by [sic] .”)

The attack was timed for a three-day holiday weekend, because the miscreants expected that the staff at our ISP would be unavailable to help up reconfigure

OBTW, the attack did not initially include our dotted quad backup address: 95.143.193.148 (Which is explained here.)

At least this provided a good test for our Continuity of Web Services (COWS) defenses. Obviously, we are now going to need multiple mirror sites as well as an adaptive cloud server that can handle any future DOS onslaught.

The other lesson this teaches is the importance of having a backup. We provide an offline archive of the past six years of SurvivalBlog posts, available for a modest price.