Is the site dead?

Freddy89534343

Space Monkey
space monkey
Joined
Oct 18, 2016
Messages
10
All I get when I try to visit it is "Additional uncaught exception thrown while handling exception.".

I can't find any posts or facebook/twitter updates about what happened, so does anyone know?
 

Freddy89534343

Space Monkey
space monkey
Joined
Oct 18, 2016
Messages
10
But yeah it has been like this for at least 12 hours. I've tried different browsers and computers so I know it's not just me.

error.jpg
 

trashKENNUT

Cro-Magnon Man
Cro-Magnon Man
Joined
Nov 20, 2012
Messages
6,553
the recent ddos attack everywhere has played a lot into how websites have been dead for awhile.

One needs to learn hacking, both the ethical and unethical methods.

Zac
 

Chase

Chieftan
Staff member
tribal-elder
Joined
Oct 9, 2012
Messages
5,484
Sorry about the (15 hours of) downtime.

We have protection in place to guard our server against DDoS. Although the one that brought a lot of sites down a few weeks back targeted upstream providers (i.e., the folks who connect your server to the wider web), and we likely still could've been brought down had they targeted ours.

What we had today were two incidents that may or may not have been related:

  • We had a table crash in the database that we could not repair
  • Then we suffered a massive brute force SSH attack in the midst of trying to get the site back up

Not sure if the two were related or if it was just someone kicking us while we were down (quite literally).

I was offline for the first 9 hours of the broken DB so didn't even know it was going on until then. We repaired the table, but it kept re-breaking. So we had to restore the site from a backup, which took about 3 hours (big DB).

While we were in the middle of that, we suffered the brute force attack, which brought the whole server down and interrupted the backup (so we had to restart the backup, after we restarted the server).

We're still not sure what caused the DB table to crash, but I've never seen that happen in 8 years of running this site (random DB crash for no obvious reason) and it doesn't seem to be a common problem, so that one's hopefully a 1-in-a-million black swan. But I will ask our devs to investigate regardless. The brute force attack we have some protections against now (all our passwords are super long and complicated; it would take hundreds of years of brute forcing to crack them... and credit card data is additionally stored off-site with our payment gateway anyway, so even if someone got in, there's nothing for them to get even if you're a customer with us).

Anyway, we're back up now and all seems to be running normally again. We'll continue to keep a close eye on things this week to make sure we don't see any repeats, though.

Chase
 

Chase

Chieftan
Staff member
tribal-elder
Joined
Oct 9, 2012
Messages
5,484
Site's down again. We had a DB table crash - same table crashed last week, prior to the brute force attack. Unsure if the two were related.

We're working to get back online again. If you're browsing GirlsChase.com, please standby for now...

Chase
 
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