Downtime report

Due to a DDOS network attack at our NOC, some of our services including the forum was not available to our users between 10:46 PM Friday and 11:27 PM Bangkok Time. Our servers was unaffected.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

' DDOS ' ' NOC, '

What on Earth are these?

Moss

Distributed Denial of Service attack and Network Operations Centre.

Thank you Cophen, I am none the wiser apart from the specific meaning of the acronym, but thanks for that.

Does the 'attack', mean a deliberate attack i.e a hacker or virus or just an unusual event.

Moss

Well, according to Wikipedia, it would have been a deliberate attack:

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted, malevolent efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely.

Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even DNS root servers.

One common method of attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consume its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.

Denial-of-service attacks are considered violations of the IAB's Internet proper use policy. They also commonly constitute violations of the laws of individual nations.[1]

The attack was not targeted to thaivisa at all, it was another server on the same C-net (subnet). The NOC had to close down the whole subnet for a while in order to null route the attacker and the attacked server.