Starting last Wednesday, August 18th GoNabit.com came under a massive Distributed Denial of Service Attack. There is more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack, but essentially this means that someone maliciously compromised many other computers and then used them to flood our site with a huge amount of traffic with the intention of making it inaccessible to our regular users.
It’s like a huge mob of people were crowded around your front door. No one got in, but your friends couldn’t get in either. It isn’t that easy to clear away the crowds when the busloads keep rolling up your street, but with the knowledge and perseverance of a great team, and the proper technology to thwart this, we’re now back nabbing it. In fact, we’re stronger than ever.
To be clear, no information on our site was ever compromised. We weren’t hacked – we were intentionally and maliciously overcrowded. To clear that mob from in front of our door that was preventing our friends from coming in and nabbing it, we went through many of the leading web hosting providers on the planet, reported this to the relevant authorities, and pursued solutions with specialized 3rd-party solution providers.
We’re back and you can get back to nabbing it. We appreciate all the kind words and offers of support. We’re sorry that you couldn’t save and discover locally for a few days, but we’ll make it up to you. We promise.
We’ll speak more in the future about how we managed to overcome this major attack, and hopefully provide some guidance based on what we’ve done and learned so that other regional sites can be prepared if this happens to them.
Thanks
Dan Stuart
Chief Executive Officer
GoNabit
p (Dubai): +971(0)4-449-3150
tw: twitter.com/gonabit
