Discussions

Good morning all,  
 
As some will be aware, this site’s hosting server was the victim of a distributed denial of service attack on Wednesday. Though there’s no effect on data/posts/ads, the site had to be offline during the day on Wednesday as part of mitigation strategy in coordination with our hosting provider. It’s now fully functional including well over 9,000 classified ads across more than 60 categories that it started yesterday with. It's great to already also have a nice flow of new daily ads already firing up. 
 
Throughout this site’s 16+ year history in serving Southwest Manitoba we’ve strived to make it as accessible as possible in as many different ways as possible and to jump to the pump to  
address any issues that come up. That took place yesterday where this was my focus from sun up to sun down. I’d like to apologize for any inconvenience this might’ve caused and look forward to a day today on the usual routine of checking content, support messages and chipping in with a little content of my own!  
 
There’s no indication of a need for another outage, but if there is in the future be it weeks, months or years from now please keep the separate address of ebrandon.net in mind in stead of the usual ebrandon.ca. The site was operational at that address yesterday. I’ve taken down that temporary .net site with the main eBrandon.ca now being live, but first move in the future would likely be to do the same if necessary. Part of that process would also be to put out status updates on the site’s social media at both Twitter and Facebook (no account necessary to view either).  
 
Again sorry for and inconvenience and thanks for your patience, understanding and patronage in being a part of eBrandon playing the role it plays in the community as a place to buy, sell, discuss and more.

Not really a hack so much as just a whole bunch of computers at once directed to keep piling up traffic on a specific server. Any given server can only handle so much at once and the server I use has been a good match for the level of traffic that eBrandon sees from actual everyday users. When a server is overwhelmed too much it can’t do it’s job of sending you web pages and if it’s insanely overwhelmed it threatens to also make other servers on the same network unusable and has to be dealt with.  
 
Often it’s just a random server targeting and that’s the assumption I go off of for what we had here based on the fact the same host was apparently dealing with an unusually high amount of similar activity elsewhere too. If you want to get really technical you can Google “ddos” and there’s lots of info. It’s actually highly illegal and from what I read could come with as much ten years in prison in Canada. Random or not, if one ever hears about someone bragging about such a thing regarding intentionally disrupting any website it’s a good thing to report to Police even if anonymously.  
 
Based on consultation with the host I’m optimistic we’ve been in a good spot from yesterday into today but still monitoring along with server host and ready to act to address further if needed.