Bad Gateway?
 

For about 8 hours yesterday I kept getting Bad Gateway and timeouts on rpgwatch.com
Was that something on your end?

It was an attempt to hack RPGWatch. The number of requests brought things to a halt. We also got over 600 attempts to hack us via the 'Contact Us', resulting in that same amount of mails and a load of attempts to get root access to the server.
The log files show that there has been no validated access to the server, but to be sure, I am still checking things.

Just so we are clear. It wasn't me!

But than you would say that wouldn't you?

First the NHS, now the Watch. I suspect the hand of S.P.E.C.T.R.E.

I noticed it too. Had to go to the Codex for my bedtime reading. I've showered four times today.

True story

I used to support a software that required all the users to be on static gateways. We partnered with Dell. Most of these customers were switching from our old "dumb terminals" on I/O ports using command lines to a modern Windows 95 machines using our modern, GUI written in Visual Basic. Yes, it was in 2000 when I started this job.

Anyways, the stores would contract out to a local ISP as they got they got a thing called "the internet" in their store for the first time and they would be happy that it worked but suddenly their computers didn't work anymore.

So with the ISP's network people there I would get them on the phone and confirm they switched their PC's to DHCP.

I would explain to them that we needed them to use static IPs. They would "explain" to me that they "needed" to be dynamic to work with their internet. I told them, no they didn't. All they needed was to leave them as static, find out what the router's IP was and put that into the router's gateway.

I kid you not (and I got this more than once and so did everyone else on support), I would get the response from the ISP's network gurus,

We don't have Gateways; we use Dells.

Some of those people… i'm curious how they ever get hired.

I was helping my friend recently get her ISP branded wireless router working properly, but we didn't have the setup access codes. When I called them up to get the info, this one kept trying to tell me that WEP was for PC WiFi, and WPA was for Apple WiFi……
I told him you better not be telling ANYONE to use WEP. I always wonder if he had an embarrassing conversation with his supervisor after that.

Must've been an Apple fan.

Probably a robot. I personally use home grown webservers. They might or might not be as secure as off the self solution; but cookie cutter hacks won't go very far.

next time tell him to use Kerberos, then driveby with your laptop.

So were we hacked again today?

Yeah, the site has seemed rather unstable of late.

I couldnt access the forums for about 3-4 hours today :(

I don't know exactly what happened. I enabled ads again yesterday and after that it started, but I am not really sure yet if the two are related. I also see a lot of access from a single IP address. It is easily brought back, but requires manual interaction with the server to do so and when I'm in bed I tend to not have access to it :)

The Bad gateway message is not uncommon for nginx (which is used as a proxy front-end on our server) and I made a number of tweaks to the settings to see if things could be resolved, but apparently that did not help (yet).

I've disabled the display of ads again to see if that helps as perhaps one of the ads software scripts is making a mess of things.
Or, it is indeed just someone overloading our server. I'll be investigating and experimenting more today, so the bad gateway message might return, but it should not be for long periods of time.