We Have A Lot Of Guests Today

There are times when a lot of people decide to visit at the same time, but that's normally only after a Twitter campaign or when I'm advertising on Facebook, which I am not doing today. Usually, when we have a lot of guests, it means a DOS attack. Since we had one a few days ago, that's probably what's happening again.

 

DOS Attack

Every web site has a finite amount of resources available to it. Most web sites are on shared servers, where they share server space with other web sites on the same server, but even large companies with banks of servers just for their sites still have a limited amount of resources available. Simplified, this might mean that our allotted resources will allow us to have a certain number of visitors on at one time. In reality, it is not measured in number of visitors but since each visitor uses up resources, the principle is the same. When the available resources is reached or exceeded, the site quits functioning properly. Visitors will get errors, and eventually they won't be able to access the site at all. Given the number of members that we have online at any given time, including visitors who haven't logged in, this should never be a problem for us, as I am paying for well over the amount of resources that we use.

In a DOS attack, the site is pinged using automatic functions, usually from thousands of computers throughout the world, but primarily China. In China, it is suspected that these attacks are largely government sponsored, and intended to disrupt Internet communications within the United States. But computers throughout the world have been hacked and taken over, often without the owners' knowledge, or through viruses and other nefarious means, and these are also used to wage DOS attacks.

Every time a web site is pinged in a DOS attack, it uses up resources as if someone was actually visiting the site, and often shows up as "guests" on our forum, although many of them don't, yet still use up our resources. So if we are targeted in a DOS attack, we might only have five members logged into the forum and five human guests who aren't logged in, but we might have hundreds and thousands of pings.

I am fairly confident that we aren't a target, in that I don't think the Chinese government is actively trying to take the Seniors Only Club site down, but Internet connections travel from one Internet hub to another, until it reaches its destination, and then it has to send information back in the other direction. So, if I am in Maine and the site that I am trying to connect to is in California, I will have to go through several Internet hubs along the way, and if any one of them is under attack, I might have trouble. That's why sometimes one person might have no problems at all connecting to a site, while someone else may not be able to.

I've posted it in another thread, but you might enjoy watching a map that shows attacks in real time. Here's one from Norse, a commercial attack database. You'll see attacks moving in both directions, some defensive. For example, Microsoft is frequently a target, and Microsoft is also frequently an attacker. The most frequent targets that I have seen have been the State of Washington, Washington DC, and St. Louis, given that nearly all Internet traffic in the United States has to go through St. Louis. I doubt that it measures them all but it gives you an idea what's going on. Here's another by Arbor Networks.

Robots

Also known as spiders, a robot is an automated function that visits sites and follows links that are found there, usually indexing them in order to provide the information necessary for search engine results. The most common robots that we get are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex (Russian), and Baidu (Chinese), although Facebook spiders our forum as well. Robots also use up resources but they also offer advantages in that we receive real visitors through search engine results.

 

532 guests (which is what we have right now) is a lot of guests, so I am guessing we're under a DOS attack. So far, it's holding up well, though.