Seems like “readers” have been missing my blog posts for the last few months when I did not blog.

I was glad for being back to blogging after months and what a wonderful welcome I have received : Denial of service attacks and loads of spam. Not only this, attempts at hacking my blog database servers and messing with the data.

All this for one post ?

There has been a continuous presence of bots attacking my websites with DoS. Here is a snapshot from the admin panel of my blog showing the number of bots attacking currently. They were double this number last night.

Bots attacking ALE-Xpressed blog for denial of service

There has been an enormous amount of spam received in the comments section of the blog. It was under 5000 few hours back but has increased to 25,000 in hours. Here is a snapshot from the comments administration panel of my blog:

25,000 spam messages received since the last blog post on Ghazwa-tul-Hind

This enormous amount of spam has put load on my database server. The size of the comments table in the database has increased tremendously thus making the blog very non-responsive. Please make a note of the size of the comments table in comparison with other tables:

The size of the comments table in my database has increased to near 100 MB thus making the blog non-responive and slow. (Large Image)

The spammers are using some very intelligent tool for spamming. The comments come through different names, emails, URLs and even unique IPs. Its tough for any anti-spamming tool to counter this. Even if the tool catches it as spam, with dozens of thousands of spam coming in through multiple intelligent bots, the amount of processing put on catching up the spam makes the blog extremely slow or completely non-responsive for many users.

Here is a snapshot from the comments table showing some of the spam received:

Some of the spam in the comments table of the blog database received after the Ghazwa-tul-Hind post

It didn’t end at spamming and DoS attacks. There has been an attempt at hacking the database servers of my blog last night. A friend reported on Facebook that the blog isn’t accessible and he is getting database connection error. I tried logging into the database server and find out that the password I had set did not work. I had to contact the support team of my hosting provider to get the password reset.

The blog post which probably made the bad boys play these dirty tricks is alternatively available here until they start doing the same with this blog.

I can’t not say for sure, but looks like the right-wing-military/ISI-apologists are at work. Probably an e-Jihad against the blog-o-fidels!

Related Post
ALE-Xpressed blocked in Pakistan | 2 June 2008