As many of you have noticed, the domain iGuRu.gr has been offline since January 1st, until today, with few and usually short-term exceptions. The following post explains what happened, which we owe you, as your interest was truly touching.
We received hundreds of emails and social media messages from people who were unable to view the website.
It all started on January 1st at 9:45AM CST (5.45 am Greek time). A major DDoS attack forced one of the data centers (Atlanta datacenter) used by iGuRu.gr's hosting provider to stop working!
During the website downtime, the cached page was displayed by Cloudflare, a service we use, but the proper functioning of the site was impossible.
Incident – 9:45AM CST – At this time we have reports of a large scale DDoS attack on one of our 3rd Party datacenters in the United States, which is causing downtime for a subset of our customers. Our data center provider is currently working to mitigate the attack. As more information becomes available we will update this post.
Denial of service attacks (Df-service attack, DoS attack) are generally called attacks against a computer, or a service provided, which aim to render the computer or service incapable of accepting other connections and thus unable to serve other potential clients.
Although the term mainly concerns network services, it is not limited to them but also refers to other fields such as the microprocessor (CPU) where a corresponding attack consumes the microprocessor's resources.
The attack is carried out by sending an excessively large number of fake requests for service, resulting in the service being unable to serve those who really want the service.
The attacks continued throughout New Year's Day, as well as the two following days.
Today at 10:20PM CST the announcement from the hosting provider we use states that the connection has been restored and is stable, although they are still trying to stabilize their systems even more.
Update 10:20PM CST: Connectivity is now stable, and our 3rd party datacenter is reporting that all attack vectors that can lead to a DDoS taking down the entire Atlanta datacenter have been blocked. We are continuing to monitor and work with them to come to a final resolution.
So 2016 came with a fairly large DDoS attack, which brought down the entire data center. In any case, the company that hosts us is one of the most reliable and we hope that it will overcome any problems soon.
We apologize for the disappointment we caused to our readers who tried to connect to the site in the past few days and we wish you a happy and creative year!
