Yes, this is more and more looking like someone decided to have some fun trying to hack into some astahost sites...my own has been affected, but I luckily keep backups of everything, including database data.

Yes, and that was a smart decision. Back-ups are necessary because you will never know when anything will implode on you. Granted, back-ups take a lot of time and are sometimes a real pain in the ass but I have heard many sob-stories about people losing a @#$%load of information. In a world filled with hackers, freak-accidents, and people you can't trust, back-ups are the most imperative, essential part of a site.

And if you're a lazy bum and "don't feel" like making back-ups, when your server gets hit by a hurricane then don't come crying to us!

Perhaps you don't realize it, but alot of problems are solved by hackers If it wasn't for hackers, security wouldn't be near as good as it is. I've been doing some posting in a forum that is explaining true hacking. As I have said in other posts, most of the websites that get harmed, are not by hackers. Granted, there are some real hackers out there that use thier knowledge for harm, but most don't.

Most sites that get attacked, are attacked by people running programs that are written by others. It's the wanna-be's that attack sites. They don't want to take the time to learn the real skill of hacking, so they try to impress people by running these programs to attack sites, or they find some unprotected sites, and they abuse it. This is *NOT* hacking.

Hacking is much like reverse-engineering. It takes alot of time, knowledge, and skill. True hacking is a good thing, because it reveals flaws missed by others. Here's the way it usually happens:

1: A hacker discovers a flaw in a program or protocol.
2: She/he informs both the company that designed the program/protocol, and the general public. (usually the info is posted on some hacking site).
3: If the company decides to take notice of this flaw, they put out an update fixing it. If they don't do anything about it, at least the information is available to the public that the program/protocol is insecure, so they can decide not to use it.
4: Some programmer takes the info about the flaw, and writes a program that exploits it.
5: Some wanna-be finds the program, and starts using it to abuse sites.

Now with a DOS attack, it's kind of a special case. Yes, it's been known about for a long time, however, it's a hard problem to fix. It is a flaw in the tcp/ip stack that the internet is built upon. It can't be fixed in the normal way, because it is a protocol problem, not a program problem. It can't be truely fixed without completely changing the foundation of the internet. No one wants to lose the internet, and it's too big of a job to completely change everything all at once.

Imagine if we suddenly found out that oxygen is poisonous. How long would it take to protect everyone on the earth? Would we even be able to find a way to make that protection affordable to everyone? See the problem?

From what I understand, Internet Protocol Version 6 (ipv6) is supposed to not be affected by attempted DOS attacks. I personally haven't had the time to study it all, but that's what I hear. But since all the internet software we use is designed for ipv4 (the current version of the internet protocol), it will take a long time before ipv4 is not used anymore.

So as you can see, it's not the hackers that are the real problem. They do us a service in finding the security flaws. It's the fact that some problems just can't be fixed very fast because of political, economical, and other reasons.

As long as there are people that want to cause harm, the internet will never be completely safe. Remember, it only takes one harmful person to cause damage, and even though the percentage of harmful people is low, the shear number of people on the internet makes that low percentage a high number. Even if only 1% of the people on the internet cause harm, if you figure 3 billion (just guessing) people on the internet, that would mean 30 million causing harm.

So please, don't blame us hackers for the problems

If you want someone to blame, there is only one: Satan the devil. He is real, and he does more damage than anyone else. If it wasn't for him, there would be no evil. Hence, there would be no crime, on the net, or elsewhere.

-YB

As you can read before, my site had been affected to...I have database backups from a few days before. Thtat's not the problem, but I actually need my database. So I sent a mail to support@astahost.com. I got an e-mail back there has a ticket been made. Does some1 know how long it could take for the staff to unsusped all these accounts?
It's free hosting, so I don't mind these things happen, but I have all sort of stupid problems this week (not only with this host)......I can wait, but please not to long.

Moody

Yeah, I got a ticket too, but since it's Sunday now, they may not work on it until tomorrow...I hope not, but that's how tech support works sometimes. However, I still think that a couple of days downtime is still better than a couple of weeks or months, like with some free web hosting.