The Conversation hit by denial of service hackers this morning
Academia-meets-journalism website the Conversation was hit by a denial of service hacker attack this morning, preventing it from posting new articles or sending its daily email for around eight hours.
The cyber attack was targeted at the site’s domain name server DNSimple and affected hundreds of sites across the world. It is believed to be related to the Cyber Monday sales which were going on in the US and UK at the time.
In a note in today’s newsletter, sent at 2pm as opposed to the regular 6am, managing editor Misha Ketchell wrote: “Apologies for the long delay in sending today’s newsletter. Our website has been down since shortly after 6am thanks to a “denial of service” attack on our domain name server, DNSimple.
“If that’s got you scratching your head, you’re not alone. A denial of service attack is easy enough to understand: it’s where malevolent hackers inundate a server with so many requests it ceases to function.
DDOS’s (distributed denial of service) aren’t pointless, and can result in serious amounts of lost revenue for websites. DNSimple hosts hundreds if not thousands of other domains, and the ‘hackers’ (there is no actual hacking involved) likely were targeting some other domain and The Conversation were caught in the crossfire.
The secret to avoiding this problem? Spend more money on a higher quality DNS host who knows how to deal with DDOS attacks.
The Conversation was not “hit by denial of service hackers”. One of their chosen service providers, DNSimple was. The actual target(s) were one, or several, of the major ecommerce sites using its services.