Current News : Sunday, January 12, 2003 19:46 GMT
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DDoS Attacks - Information for Users of DALnet.
DALnet is presently suffering extensive and prolongued Distributed Denial of Service attacks against our IRC servers, Web server, mail servers and DNS systems. These attacks are causing great inconvenience and financial loss to many of the organizations that host our services, as such some of them have suspended or discontinued their support of DALnet. The following servers have been delinked either temporarily or permanently as a direct result of the ongoing attacks :
* Acool-e.dal.net
* Tiscali.dal.net
* Sodre.dal.net
* Mesra.dal.net
* Games.dal.net
DALnet would like to extend our thanks to all those who sponsored servers, we are grateful for the support you have provided us during what are difficult times. Users may also find it difficult to access our websites or send mail to @dal.net addresses due to attacks on the web, mail and DNS servers.
Some questions we are being asked regularly during these attacks should be answered by the FAQ below.
Q: Why are you not able to stop the attacks, it looks like you aren't in control of things!
That is because we are _not_ in control of things. A person or group of persons unknown are using Distributed Denial of Service techniques to litterally destroy our network. In doing so they are causing great inconvenience to our hosts as well as to us and our users. By the very nature of DDoS it's almost impossible to trace and impossible to defend against. There is, quite honestly, nothing we can do. If this person or group decide to destroy DALnet, they will do so and we cannot stop them.
Q: Why don't you do something about it?
We have done all that is possible. We have lodged complaints with those ISP's we can trace, most of which are ineffective. We have involved various law enforcement officials but legal investigations take time to conduct and don't provide any immediate solution to the problem. There is no more we can do, please remember we are a free service run by volunteers on donated equipment and bandwidth, we cannot simply throw more bandwidth at the problem and even if we could, the attacks are so massive it would make little if any difference.
Q: Why don't you call in the FBI?
DALnet and it's sponsors are working with various law enforcment agencies towards tracing and prosecuting the people behind these attacks. Legal investigations do however take time to complete and we are unable to comment any further on the status of those investigations.
Q: Why don't you talk to Steve Gibson of GRC.COM, he knows all about this stuff?
We already have many people working with us who are intimately familiar with DDoS attacks and how to deal with them.
Q: I can't connect to any servers, help!
There's no help we can offer. If you can't connect to a server, neither can we. The best we can suggest is to try another server although we appreciate it is difficult to find any servers currently accepting clients.
Q: When will the attacks stop?
We don't know. They will stop when either the attackers decide to stop attacking, the attackers get arrested or shut down by their ISP's or when DAlnet runs out of good will from it's sponsors and is forced to close.
Q: I have information about the attacks, how can I get it to you?
If you have any information which may be of use to us in tracing the perpetrators of these attacks, please use the contact form on http://kline.dal.net/exploits/info.htm
