Power Line Outage Caused by al Qaeda Attack

Some of you noticed that our site was down for a few hours last night. I checked around and found that most if not all sites hosted by Hosting Matters were down, as was the main HM site. Apparently the cause of the outage was an al Qaeda denial-of-service attack that was directed at an Israeli site called Internet Haganah, which is hosted by Hosting Matters. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs has the details on this page of comments. Aaron Weisburd, the proprietor of Internet Haganah, says:
“Supporters of a number of Al Qaida-affiliated forums registered to Saudis and running in Malaysia basically declared an online Jihad against Haganah after 8 such sites lost their third party DNS service a couple of weeks ago (the DNS provider decided they didn’t want to provide services to such folks)….GeoCities sites have been used to distribute the attack tools, and a site at Everyone’s Internet posted howto graphics that show not just how to use the tools, but specifically how to use them to attack our site.
“Hosting Matters has done their best to keep the site online in the face of an increasing level of hostile traffic, but there’s only so much one can do unless you can get someone at the backbone level to block the incoming ’rounds.'”
Which, of course, raises my already-high opinion of Hosting Matters. Some of the comments on LGF are by Stacy Tabb, who designed our site and also works part-time for HM. Their commitment is basically to free speech, and they appear to have done all they can to fight off the al Qaeda attacks.
So the war comes, in a direct but not very threatening way, to our little corner of the blogosphere.

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