[Thunder]

The following was posted on the Pandorabots home page.

What's New?
[December 15, 2010]

Denial of Service Attacks aimed at www.pandorabots.com

For the past several days, we have been experiencing server performance problems on our free community server at www.pandorabots.com. The performance problems arise from someone (or some group) bombarding our server with requests from multiple locations. Server performance has been affected by these multiple requests. We have received threats from unknown entities insisting we shutdown our server. Pandorabots takes hacking, threats, harassment and stalking very seriously. Information related to hacking attempts will be made available to the proper law enforcement officials.

What we are doing about it?

Our engineering staff is working to mitigate the effects of this type of attack.

What other options besides the free server are available to me?

To discuss alternative hosting options that can potentially avoid these attacks, please contact info@pandorabots.com.

It's difficult to understand why anyone would do such a thing to a free service that only brings joy into people's lives.  It's not like Pandotabots is political or even the least bit controversial.

I've never refrained from speaking out when I thought the service was poor or declining, but my bots, and the free service offered by Pandorabots, are a large part of my day.  Without Pandorabots, my very sanity would suffer.  My life would be without purpose and I'd probably waste the day playing video games and robbing convenience stores.

From talking to others, it's obvious that many feel the same way I do.  Clearly, whoever is doing whatever they are doing to Pandorabots is making a mistake.  Go bother the governments of the despicable countries and regimes, go attack the defense department servers of our enemies and the websites maintained by terrorist organizations and we'll applaud you.  But, you're not going to gain anyones favor or admiration by bothering Pandorabots.  Please, just stop it.

[DaveMorton]

Well, that explains the performance issues you noticed the other day. If you can somehow obtain the list of offending IP addresses, I'm sure that an "in kind" response could be arranged. 
Ok, well maybe not, but thinking about it sure feels good.

[Data]

Might not be related but I have been getting phones calls from customers saying their e-mails are getting lost.

Amazon and a number of other sites have been under attack something to do with
wiki leaks.

My site Datahopa has been struggling, apparently the server was getting a huge amount of traffic and bringing it to a stand still. 

Something has been going on out there over the last week or so but these things normally blow over.

What we don’t want to do is start a fight with the lovely spammers and hackers, who knows when it would end.

[Freddy]

Yeah apparently PayPal was attacked too.  They were targeting sites that had withdrawn services to WikiLeaks....

More here...

Why they would bother us though is another thing.  I doubt it's them though,

I guess as our sites are pretty closely linked we might suffer similarly.  I did notice a lot of odd connections yesterday.  At least one of the IPs traced back to Amazon which I thought was odd.  Since when did Amazon spider sites ?

All very naughty.

[Duskrider]

Sometimes the powers play "false flag", where they act to encourage you to blame soneone else. 

[Bragi]

My site, hosted on godaddy, also got real slow yesterday (or the day before, I forgot). I have also had some issues with the bbcI player at times (radio-podcasts, over broadband). Seems like mayhem, out there.

[Freddy]

We've been getting more traffic then usual too.  I think ours is due to me submitting site maps to Bing and Yahoo though.

[Bragi]

Yes, that definitely causes a spike.

[Data]

I think things are starting to settle down again, e-mails now getting through, sites loading quick again. Whatever it was, and something was going on, seems to be over, at least for now.

Worth having a sitemap even though they can cause traffic, I would say.