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Update: What's been going on at Atomic8Ball?
Last week we faced some slow loading pages and interruptions of mail service. While not by any means an excuse, here is the tale of woe and our actions taken to prevent this from recurring: Beginning late the week before last we began noticing periodic spikes in our bandwidth consumption. As of last week these became so severe that they began to interrupt service. We made some immediate configuration changes that prioritized the websites keeping them up, although at times quite slow, during the majority of the incident. Other services such as mail were impacted more severely. Eventually the culprit was determined to be an unusually high influx of spam; on a good day over 80% of all mail we receive is rejected as spam but this was much, much more than even that (our 100Mbps connection was saturated - effectively a Denial of Service attack). Our suspicion is that a recent security breach of our phone system (word to the wise: 1234 is NOT an effective remote IP phone password) added us to some sort of a "suckers" list maintained by nefarious individuals and we consequently were targeted by an unusually high number of spammers. The offending machines were globally located and appeared to be just zombies on a bot-net. 
After making this identification we refined our firewall and upgraded our spam-filter to preemptively disconnect from suspected machines greatly reducing the impact of the spam-tide on our bandwidth (before, the spam filter "read" the whole message before deciding if it was spam or not - now if a machine has sent spam in the last few days it is "hung up on" immediately). We've been stable since Friday and have experienced no further issues. While we appreciate your tolerance and understanding as we take on these challenges our goal continues to be to prevent them from occurring; to that end we're confident our recent upgrades will resist any future disruptions and now plan to further expand our infrastructure in the upcoming months. Andrew Courser
Chief Technology Officer |
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