Recent Down Times

[Num7]

Hi everyone,

The forum has been under attack for the last few days. We're talking about DDOS attacks here, that are taking the site down. The symptom is a Forbidden 403 error.

I'm currently in contact with my hosting provider in order to resolve the issue and to prevent the attackers from harming the forum any longer. I haven't decided yet if we're going to move to a new hosting provider or not though...

The site itself is secure and our content is safe. But don't be surprised if pages take a little longer to load than usual.

Thank you for your patience.

--Num7

 

[kcwildman]

cool thnks for the heads up,, was getting the 403 thing my self yesterday, and wondered bout it being some kind of hack.. had me runnin sec. scans for virus on my unit..

 

[TimeWizardCosmo]

Turning on "I'm under attack" like you've done in Cloudflare will solve this. Have your host change your IP, then keep Cloudflare set up like you have it. Cloudflare is a reverse proxy, so as long as you have the orange cloud turned on (and aren't doing anything else that exposes the IP), the attacks should stop.

If you have A record subdomains set up (mail, webmail, cpanel, whm, etc.), replace those with CNAME records that point to paranormalis.com. You can't have the orange cloud turned on for some of those, so this helps prevent someone from guessing a common subdomain and discovering your IP that way.

 

[TimeFlipper]

It appears that there could be government forces wanting to shut us down....Maybe we are getting too close to the truth about Time-Travel..

 

[titorite]

I was wondering. Been having issues myself. But who would ddos paranormalis and why?

 

[Mayhem]

@Num7 best of you answering that question.

 

[TimeFlipper]

It could be any government agency actually...The software to create a DDOS has been around for some while, i believe it was originally used to "stress test" websites by firstly sending out a non viral message that attached itself to any persons computer without their knowledge, who was on the internet at that time....

Lets assume there were 10,000 people on the internet who had that message on their computers....All of the 10,000 would then be directed to Paranormalis (or any other website) which would disturb the ability to handle that amount of people all at the same time, causing a disruption to how our website sets out its coherent system.....I hope i have accurately explained how the DDOS works thats causing "stress" to us @titorite

 

[titorite]

I know what a distributed denial of service attack is. I had a programmer buddy back in the day and he progragammed a one click thing so that anyone could blast a particular website. Theirs alot more to that story. But anyways.

I was more wondering about the who and why. A government stress test doesnt sound logical to me but then again our government does crazy stupid shit all the time dont it. But i was wondering maybe harritB the revenge or something like that or maybe some other jilted former member..... now that you got me thinking about it maybe the NZ gov targeting us for talking about christchurch.

I saw the same cloud flare message when looking at kiwifarms too.

Idk.

We are such a small website here... targeting us just doesnt make sense in my head.

 

[TimeWizardCosmo]

I'm a web developer and we see this kind of thing with our clients all the time. More often than not, it's not some guy in a basement trying to mess with Num.

These kinds of attacks are usually penetration testing, trying to find weaknesses in the software or server so they can inject malicious code into the site. This isn't done by a person, but a botnet or an automated script that's programmed to hit a ton of sites to find a weakness.

Look at the footer of this site - Do you see where it says "Forum Powered by xenForo"? That's all it takes to get on someone's hacking list. If you know the software a site uses, and you know older versions of that software have security vulnerabilities, it's as simple as Googling for that "powered by" message and targeting whatever sites show up.

Could it be some asshole at the Pentagon trying to take this place down? ...Sure. Why not. I doubt it though.

 

[titorite]

I'm a web developer and

HOW CAN I MAKE MY 2014 ASUS LAPTOP RUN FASTER WITH STOCK EQUIPMENT?!?!

what do i need to do? Defrag more often? Set some win10 setting to zero? Pray to pagan computer gods? How do i get better performance outta my beast. Wave your magical computer wand at me that i might have decent steam gaming again.