Our website was down for the best part of 48 hours, from 12 to 14 March. This was due to a “DD0S” or “Distributed Denial of Service” attack, in which hijacked computers attack a website or internet provider by basically mass spamming it, sending a massive quantity of information requests to overload the system.

The attack was not against our site in particular, but against a number of non-corporate internet providers, including our hosts. Autistici/Inventati (A/I), the Italian collective who also runs the noblogs platform, was one of the worst affected.

At this time it is not clear who was responsible. According to the comrades at A/I: “DDoS vs tech collectives is apparently a new sport for script kiddies. Or for secret services trying to downgrade our privacy”.

Below is the statement A/I put out yesterday. NB: in case of future attacks, the collective runs a back-up blog https://autistici.blackblogs.org/, they also use twitter @cavallette.

Is a DDoS attack going on? Be patient or use secure services!

In the last few weeks Autistici/Inventati as well as other autonomous servers such asRiseup or Nodo50 have been targeted by DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

A DDoS attack consists in a huge flow of bogus traffic all at once in an effort to overwhelm an infrastructure and to block the functioning of the services offered by the server. This way, the server cannot answer the requests to visualize web pages, to download mail, to connect to jabber and so on. As a consequence, if users are in a hurry, they can be pushed to use commercial services, that are more resistant to DDoS attacks and therefore offer more stable services. We strongly advise you against making decisions dictated by hurry. In order to prevent risks for your privacy, we recommend you to create a backup mailbox with another friendly server and to use an alternative jabber service (like the oneRiseup offers with all its mailboxes or Systemli‘s jabber service) instead of turning to a commercial instant messaging platform.