We are getting very close to Christmas and the last 3 days were the opposite of peaceful for us here in the viralurl headquarters.
Instead of a traditional present under the tree… somebody decided to send us 3 DDOS attacks spread out over 2 1/2 days.
Now, usually, each DDOS takes a site down about 24 hours as the upstream network providers usually wait that long before removing a null-route from an IP that was DDOS attacked.
But thanks to our amazing technical support staff (thank you Jamie… you are the best!), we got the site back up within just hours after each attack.
With the last attack, we were able to find out the exact method the attacker used and where able to put pre-emptive countermeasures into place.
Same as we did… you might ask yourself, what makes somebody spend time, resources & money to launch a DDOS attack against a single web site?
Especially if that attack in the end just gives a few hours of downtime, but otherwise leaves no permanent damage?
Based on some (actually a few hundred) spam messages that the attacker send to us… it looks like what ticked off this individual were emails he received from other viralurl members.
Based on this, we decided to make sure all emails we send out through our system have easier to follow account deletion links, allowing any member that no longer wants to be a member to simply click it and make a choice to either upgrade or delete his or her account.
In order to do the right thing, this changes will be implemented over the next few days and as always, we are looking forward to hearing your feedback on what else we can do to make viralurl even better with the upcoming 3.0 improvements.
Wishing you all a Merry (and peaceful) Christmas Season!
To Your Success in Business & Life,
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| Frank Bauer CEO, Add2it.com |
& | Colin Klinkert CEO, ColinKlinkert.com |
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Yes, DDOS attacks suck, sounds like your tech person Jamie rocks it, don’t let em get away. I see you use Cloud Flare, did that help too? I’m a fan of their DNS service. I notice viralurl.com/ is still down. All that being said… Yeah I think ya got a spam problem. I just recently joined ViralNetworks and get blasted with spam everyday. At least 10 emails a day from the same person, all identical. Mobile has brought email back to marketing, behaviour has changed. As professionals we must bring exclusivity and targeting into email marketing. Customers are cautious about giving out their real email addresses, make them want to.
Suggestions for the future for all professionals to follow:
#1) Don’t over send emails e.g, 10 emails in 4 hours is excessive.
#2) Segment by preferences based on interests rather than frequency.
#3) Learn about your customers in order to make data decisions. Use historical data to choose what the customer wants to hear about. Look through your sales history to provide relevant data in mailings.
#4) Understand that Customers have individual value and you want them to stay on your list. The new mantra is: S.E.E.A.T. = stop emailing everyone all the time.
You need to lay down the law on ALL violators.
Here’s to a healthy and successful 2015 for everyone.
Bruce Fanning
Hi Bruce,
Yes… CloudFlare is one out of two systems we are using now to protect our site. This particular attack type can be fixed on ISP level by blocking port forwarding.
And you are right… our site was one more time down after attack #5. That hole is now secured as well.
Thank you also for your heads up on the spammer in ViralPLR. Thanks to you we where now able to fix a bug in ViralPLR that the spammer abused.
You got some great common sense suggestions there, thanks a lot for sharing.
Regards,
Frank Bauer