*** Michelle has a round up here on the attack, lots of blogs still down ***

Our service, Hosting Matters, was the victim of a major denial of service attack. Actually it was one of their customers, but the attack was truly large and had us down nearly 3 hours. Here is some of what was posted from the emergency forum site:

The target of this attack is not a high profile site, is not very well known outside of their own little circle, and otherwise is unremarkable. However, they’ve managed to irritate someone badly enough to have their site hacked twice and now they’ve generate this. So, as with anything that negatively affects every other client, we make adjustments. In this case, it means sending them out of the network so as not to impact anyone else.

The primary source appears to be Saudi Arabia. However, the nature of DOS attacks is that they originate from any number of places, via machines that are zombied, trojaned, or otherwise compromised.

Regarding the initial question: neither our own authorities (based on our experience with investigations of DOS attacks and other types of attacks) nor those in the country of origination are going to care about this enough to do anything about it. It’s a sad fact of life.

Sorry for the inconvenience – we seem to be back. I would not expect all the emails to have survived though. My thanks to Hosting Matters for doing what they could.