In the past few days, we have been under DDOS attack. This DDOS attack was caused by Iranian government websites (such as Fars News) embedding links in the form of
http://www.pagereboot.com/?url=http://balatarin.com&refresh=30
in their pages (in the form of iframe). When a visitor goes to Fars News website, they start sending hundreds of queries to balatarin in the background without their own knowledge. This results in the slow down of Balatarin and sometime in complete crash of the website….
We have asked Balatarin users to make calls to all the contacts listed on pagereboot website. Under Britain law where pagereboot is located, launching DDOS attacks are illegal and can result in fine or prison.
Technical note: It is very difficult for us to fight against such DDOS attacks. When we ban attacking ips, we are actually banning the innocent visitors who are reading news on the Iranian government news agencies and have no intention of attacking Balatarin. They are not aware of the tricks used by Iranian government’s news websites to attack other sites. These visitors lose their future access to Balatarin. Also, since some of the are accessing balatarin using proxies in Iran, their entire proxy loses access to Balatarin. We have banned several hundred ips just today. This has seriously affected the access of our own users to our website.
We have talked to one network security expert, and he believed it would be very difficult to distinguish good guys from bad guys in this case because people are fooled to attack other sites without them knowing.
PS. Thanks to Balatarin users who also called pagereboot and followed up, Pagereboot has taken down their service and has apologized for the problems caused.