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ProBlogger Got DoSed
John Stith
Staff Writer
2006-03-02
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
The blogging guru Darren Rowse had his blog, ProBlogger, pummeled by a denial-of-service (DoS) on Tuesday. Rowse acknowledged the assault on his blog on Wednesday morning. This is just another in recent trend of attacking bloggers.
Rowse has been quite successful in the blogging business, posting in one ProBlogger post he expected to make a six-figure salary in 2005 from various moneymaking ventures tied to the blog. Denial-of-service attacks often come as part of an extortion scheme, demanding money or taking down the sight permanently.
Rowse isn't the only prominent blogger attacked recently either. Conservative political pundit Michelle Malkin also had her blog attacked after posting the anti-Muslim political cartoons from Denmark. While the reasons were different, as bloggers gain more notice, chances are there will be more assaults.
Rowse kept his cool, responding, "It's nice to feel noticed" but this assault was probably annoying to say the very least. DoS attacks can be costly and for some sites, fatal. In many cases the reasons for going down are financial. Someone wants money. In others though, like Malkin's, the reasoning was political. That type of assault falls in line with the various waves of defacements plaguing European websites in recent weeks.
Cybersecurity analyst Richard Stiennon had some ideas on how to minimize damage from these types of attacks on his own blog:
Everyone who values their publishing platform should start to investigate defenses now rather than after becoming a victim. Things you can do:
1. Host on a robust platform with up to date patches.
2. Have redundant load balanced servers.
3. Negotiate higher burstable bandwidth from your ISP/hosting provider.
4. Invest in DDoS defenses. TopLayer and Arbor Networks are two possibilities. Prolexic offers a managed service.
5. Use a web application firewall.
While these aren't the only ways, they are certainly good ones. He did add one more comment though:
Just don't be surprised when your web operations are disrupted by fanatics or crooks.
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Tag: Blog Denial-Of-Service Attacks
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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