Hi all,
Some of you may or may not be aware that for the last 10 days my blog, Whizzbangsblog.com, has been down due to a consistent DDOS attack. The reason for the attack was directly due to my articles on people that are committing fraud in the domain industry by pumping bad traffic through domains, purchasing parking accounts and stealing good domain owner’s identities. This behaviour is rampant and is costing us all millions of dollars.
Initially the fraudsters struck at my blog and then moved the DDOS to my company parklogic.com (which is OK BTW), to michaelgilmour.com and now finally back to whizzbangsblog.com. They have been communicating to me via the referral URL which in the last instance was the following:
173.245.53.77 – – [06/Sep/2011:00:13:51 +1000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 316 “http://lastwarning-shutdown-yourblog-or-die-withyourparklogic.com/” “Mozilla/5.0(compatible;MSIE 8.0;Windows NT 6.0;InfoPath.1;.NET CLR 3.0.04506.648;.NET CLR 2.0.50727)”
It’s the first time in my life I received such a threat and upon speaking with the police they indicated that I should take it seriously. I have now contacted CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) in both the USA and Australia, Victorian Police, Federal Police, FBI (still trying to find the right person) and I have now been told by the police to contact the Secret Service Cyber-crime area in Washington.
In one of my blogs I posted an email that had been circulating that related to purchasing parking accounts and the response was incredible. Many domainers didn’t know about this activity and why it was bad for their reputation and the industry they operate in. My guess is that many of them stopped selling accounts and this has caused the fraudsters some problems…..hence the DDOS.
Our industry is under threat from unscrupulous scumbags and I have no intention in bowing down to threats like this. I do not negotiate with terrorists that hijack an industry that I love and steal from friends that I greatly respect. I would ask this of my fellow bloggers. Please support me in exposing these people and feel free to publish this email. It will mean a brave stand and I will not feel any ill will for those of you who do not feel you are able to fight this fight. Please let me know if you would like any of the previous posts I made – I’ll see if I can get them off my server.
BTW – my skype address is whizzbang01 if you need to speak with me or call on the below number during Melbourne, Australia business hours. This is normally as late in the day as possible for the USA.
Warmest Regards,
Michael
PS. I should say that ParkLogic is secure and whizzbangsblog.com is able to put a simple HTML text page out due to the help from cloudflare.com
If you have any knowledge of this or similar attacks, please let us know and we will inform the proper authorities. Thanks for listening,
Howard