synflood

synflood

Well crap. My hosting provider got synflooded earlier today. I guess that's kind of like getting slashdotted or farked, except that it's by zombie PC's instead of by 30-year-old virgins still living in their parents' basements.

Although I suspect slashdot may have had something to do with it... Posted something earlier today on a thread about four new IE bugs and it ended up getting modded up as informative. Which brought me some extra traffic. Which in itself isn't unusual or alarming, as my hosting provider could handle it just fine.

But it brought attention to a post on my blog about a scammer who has been exploiting the relatively unknown (until today) vulnerability. It even has a link to his fake eBay site. About two hours after the slashdot crowd came in, the synflood began and the server went down. I'd never seen a DDOS with this hosting provider until today, so I suspect that there's a connection. Somebody just didn't like the extra attention I'd brought and took it out on my server.

Of course, it could all be a coincidence. But life is so much more interesting when you are paranoid. :P