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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The websites for several US government agencies, including some that patrol cyber crime, have been under attack since July 4, as a denial of service attack made many of these sites slow or accessible for as many as three days, signifying an unusually lengthy and sophisticated DoS attack.
The Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department websites were down at various periods beginning on the holiday weekend, according to the Associated Press, which spoke to officials inside and outside the government, who also noted that some sites were still experiencing problems as recently as Tuesday evening.
Not confined to government agencies, the DoS attack affected other Washington DC targets: The Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com) and its Security Fix blog (voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix). Security Fix blogger Brian Krebs said The Post had been under attack by roughly 60,000 compromised PCs from around the world, running malicious software that orders them to visit targeted websites over and over, rendering them unreachable to legitimate visitors.
SecureWorks (www.secureworks.com) malware research director Joe Stewart told Security Fix said the attack is hitting various sites in the US and South Korea simultaneously. The mysterious attack contained few clues of its origins, except for a cryptic line of text buried in the malware, which reads "get/china/dns."
While there has been no official statement from a name government official, security and monitoring companies have commented on the severity of the attack. Keynote Systems (www.keynote.com) Internet technologies director Ben Rushlo told the Associated Press that the Transportation Department site was completely offline for two days, and the FTC site, which started to come back online late Sunday, was still inaccessible 70 percent of the time on Tuesday.
"This is very strange. You don't see this," he told the Associated Press. "Having something 100 percent down for a 24-hour-plus period is a pretty significant event... The fact that it lasted for so long and that it was so significant in its ability to bring the site down says something about the site's ability to fend off (an attack) or about the severity of the attack."
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Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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