This is the email sent to all clients on server05, but to make sure, I'm posting it here as well. After all, server05 is our 'gold' server :o)
Hello Everyone, As most of you would have noticed, the web sites hosted on our Server 05 were not accessible since Sunday, but have been coming back online, one by one, since last night. The total down time, accourding to internetseer.com was: 3 days, 6 hours, 10 minutes, 45 seconds For a venture of our size such a long down time did require substantial resources and more than basic knowledge on the side of the attackers, who were neither turned away nor fooled into directing their attacks at another server instead, which is what most less sophisticated adversaries often fall for. Instead, the attack was well planned and executed. Our problem was that we had no way of telling how long the barrage would last, nor how many waves there would be. had we known in advance, then we could have changed the IP addresses much earlier, which would have brought your site back up faster. I expect that now you would like me to say, that we are better prepared and notjing comparably will ever happen again. Unfortunately i can not promise you that, as indeed nobody could. Large sites lite CNN, e-bay, Amazon, WorldPay, and many others have repeatedly fallen victim to DDOS attacks, and there is unfortunately no silver bullet. DDOS can affect anyone, anywhere and anytime. We have removed some of the sites we considered possible or likely targets of the attack, and hope that that is sufficient to reasonably assure that no further attacks afe directed at us - or you. It is pretty clear to me that many of you have lost substantial business, traffic, subscribers, money, much in the same way we did. There is no excuse for the actions of the people who did it, and their likely technical sophistication further degrades their actions. But, unfortunately there is not much we can do about it, even though we have a pretty good idea of who initiated it all and will try to take appropriate action, accordingly. Should for some reason your domain not resolve correctly yet, or should you have problems receiving or sending email, please rest assured that this is only due repeated DNS changes, and will resolve itself as the Name space system updates itself the next time, world-wide. During the attack we did reply to each email we received. If you did not receive a reply, then we most likely did not receive your mail. If for any reason you need to contact us and can not do so the normal way, please always feel free to visit www.u2networks.com or www.cyfrocash.com and submit support requests there. Thank you for many mails of support and please feel free to forward this message to your clients if the need arises to show that you were not at fault for the downtime. Kind regards, Robert B. Ziegler Chmn. CF Group CYBERFRONTIER U2NETWORKS -------------------est 1991---------------------- privacy domain and website hosting: http://cyberfrontier.net e-commerce & e-business services: http://www.cyfrocash.com directory to the online gold economy http://thegoldindex.com start a profitable online business http://www.cyberfrontier.biz ---------------------------------------- --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Use e-gold's Secure Randomized Keyboard (SRK) when accessing your e-gold account(s) via the web and shopping cart interfaces to help thwart keystroke loggers and common viruses.