Some of you may have heard about an Internet worm that was attacking bulletin board software during the last two weeks of December. Unfortunately, the UBC Botanical Garden Forums were one of the targets (among hundreds, if not thousands). Starting December 26 at 2 AM PST and ending when the web server was reconfigured slightly at 10 PM December 27, I first noticed the attack at Dec 26, 10 AM. The forums were shut down from that time to Dec 28 at 7:30 AM PST. Noticed is too weak a word - after all, I had 8000 emails sent to me in 8 hours (from the forum software) letting me know about the database crashing! All data is safe and secure, but the effect of the attack was to overwhelm the server, cause the database to crash and make the web site extremely slow (and bog down my email). Fortunately, the change made to the web server now gives me the ability to head off these kinds of attacks (and others) much more rapidly, so hopefully I can deal with this kinds of situations much more rapidly in the future. You can read about this attack here: Google news search for "santy + worm + boards" (note - the garden runs forum software by vBulletin which is not affected by the worm other than having to deal with a bunch of nonsense requests and causing crashes) http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=124159 Regards, Daniel Mosquin
