We have to apologize for the recent downtime, but our server has been slammed over the last few days in distributed Denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. We don’t know why our website has been targeted, but all we can do is hope that it ends soon. Most of the attacks come from IP addresses based in Europe and Asia, although occasionally there are hacking attempts (not DDoS attacks) from IPs located in the US.
For those of who don’t know what a DDoS is, it’s essentially when multiple systems from different IPs are used to overrun the bandwidth capacity of a specifically targeted website. We guess we should feel good that our site may be considered high profile enough to waste computing resources on, but we can’t really imagine there is much to gain by taking down our server.
In any case, we’ve made a few tweaks to our firewall that will hopefully deter some of the attacks. Another action we’ve taken is a temporary IP approval through Cloudflare’s protection service. So if you see an interim browser check page it’s nothing that you should be concerned with. Thank you for your patience and for returning to HD Report!
