Encounters with the Dark Side of the Internet

Yesterday, we were affected by one of the more malicious and annoying attacks on the internet and it wasn’t even directed at CampBrain. The company that we rely on for DNS (the service that translates “you.campbrainoffice.com” into the IP address of our servers) was the target of a Denial of Service attack. Put simply, hackers used dozens of computers across the world to simultaneous flood the servers of Hover with requests. This massive load overwhelmed their servers and meant that legitimate requests couldn’t get through. This began around 3:40pm ET and continued through until 6:40pm. Services were then back online for an hour until there was a further disruption from 7:40pm ET to 8:40pm. Everything was back to normal at that point. Full detail on the incident can be found here.

While our own servers stayed up during this time, it’s of small comfort for those of you who couldn’t get through. The impact of the above is that you may not have been able to access CampBrain Web at times during this incident – the DNS issue did not impact all regions in the same way and when it did impact a region, the length of time varied.

We’re currently investigating ways to distribute our DNS to multiple services so if any one of them has issues, the others will still work.

We appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience this caused you yesterday.