MailScanner gets into The Daily WTF

[Julian Field]

Take a look at the last image on this page:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Fortune-Not-Found.aspx

A very amusing collection of screenshots, but the last one is very relevant.
People really have heard about us :-)

And now we've had our very first DDoS (distributed denial of service) 
attack too. Half a million simultaneous requests to download the 
phishing.bad.sites.conf file from www.mailscanner.eu brought the website 
to its knees for a few minutes, until the crack squad at Blacknight 
leapt into action and firewalled off the site temporarily. As far as 
denial-of-service attacks go, it was pretty ineffective as the only 
remotely long-lasting effect was that sites didn't get updates to their 
phishing.bad.sites.conf file for a couple of days. So new phishing sites 
would have got away with it for two days, but that's hardly the end of 
the world :-)

If they are going to try tricks like that, they are going to have to hit 
me a whole lot harder than that. Which reminds me, I need to set up some 
mirroring jobs so I have a backup coopy of the main websites at work, 
where we have a much fatter pipe but less reliable service.

Jules

-- 
Julian Field MEng CITP CEng
www.MailScanner.info
Buy the MailScanner book at www.MailScanner.info/store

MailScanner customisation, or any advanced system administration help?
Contact me at Jules at Jules.FM

PGP footprint: EE81 D763 3DB0 0BFD E1DC 7222 11F6 5947 1415 B654
PGP public key: http://www.jules.fm/julesfm.asc


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