PP Blog Returns After 4-Day Outage Caused By DDoS Attack; Site Flooded Saturday By Millions Of Hits
Dear Readers,
The PP Blog was brought down Saturday by a DDoS attack that flooded its servers with more than 6.1 million “hits” during a three-hour window. The Blog was shut down for security reasons, and federal law-enforcement agencies have been made aware of the attack.
We were made aware of the nature of the attack this morning. Software engineers initially described the event as “suspicious,” saying the Blog suddenly had received an “immense” amount of traffic.
Our heartfelt appreciation is extended to readers who contacted us and expressed their concern and their support for the Blog’s editorial mission during the outage.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Patrick
Glad you are back, Patrick.
Keep shining the light on the cockroaches of internet scams.
They will keep scurrying out of the light, back under the rocks from whence they came, and, occasionally, will lash out in anger and frustration as this episode shows.
Keep up the great work and they’ll keep scrambling.
Thanks for your efforts and tenacity.
ARWR
Thank you for your note, ARWR.
Patrick
Great to have you back. Was going through withdrawals, and tired of answering E-mails as to what happened to your blog when I had no clue. LOL! You were missed, and so glad you’re back.
@@ Whew, My OCD Was Working Overtime. I Can’t Miss a Day. :-)
Great to have you back
I still think it was those pesky Russian hackers that stole $1 million from Andy and $2.7 million from AVGA. But that’s just me.
Glad you’re back Patrick. I always look forward to reading your blog to keep up with the latest scammer news.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm………wonder who targeted your blog. I’m sure there’s a long line of suspects who would be more than happy to have your blog disappear.
Give yourself a pat on the back as the doss attack only means you are doing a great job exposing these scams…
Great to have you back…
Welcome back!. It’s a tribute to journalistic accuracy that “person or persons unknown” felt the need to remove accessability to your reports – and further confirmation of the criminal elements’ desperation to remove the facts from view.
A DDOS attack should be further proof of the criminal involvement in these ponzi schemes.
Slightly off topic, from a week ago:
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/business/a/-/wa/8149321/account-at-mint-linked-to-us-crime/
It is no coincidence that on HYIP ponzi forums most, if not all of the “latest and greatest” include, as part of their pitch, the fact that the HYIP has “DDoS protection”
In fact, there are companies which specialize in providing such DDoS protection and/or webhosting specifically for HYIPs.
The “average Joe” has no concept of the level of criminal activity which operates with apparent impunity just below the surface of the HYIP ponzi “games”
Glad to have you back up, running and continuing to expose these criminal ponzi/pyramid schemes.
Glad the site is back up. I didnt know what happened. I did finally stumbled into ponzi news yesterday and found your posts. Nice to have things back to normal.
To paraphrase the old spiritual: Back at last! Back at last! Thank God Almighty, you are back at last!
-PWD
Hello flashlight,
I’m glad you found the PonziNews post. I haven’t been publishing there much because, it the earliest days of PonziNews, 100 percent of the content was stolen by pirates verbatim and placed on sites hidden behind proxies.
In effect, the thieves were relying on me to create content — and then stealing it and placing it on their own sites without so much as a backlink. I had hope to build PonziNews into an authority site.
Perhaps one day I’ll resume a regular publishing schedule on PonziNews. Thieves more or less killed my desire to continue to build the site. It looked as though they used already-existing domains that had a higher PR than PonziNews, and simply stole all the content and drove traffic to their own sites.
I am grateful for your note, flashlight.
Thank you.
Patrick
Thank you, laidback.
Patrick
Hello Pat,
Your correspondence with the PP Blog and your thought-proving comments have been greatly appreciated. I very well remember the “five-gallons” analogy you applied to ASD. It put readers “right there.”
My gratitude and respect to you, Sir.
Patrick
Lynn wrote: “Was going through withdrawals, and tired of answering E-mails as to what happened to your blog when I had no clue.”
I replied:
Lynn, I am thankful for your notes and words of encouragement over these past several days. I’m also humbled that folks who could not reach the Blog reached out to you.
We lost our email, too. It’s back now, but a few glitches remain.
Thank you, Lynn.
Patrick
Thank you, anonymous. I needed a good laugh. :-)
Patrick
Hello Baylee,
I’ve seen your posts elsewhere, and appreciate it that you stopped by here.
Thank you.
Patrick
Hello Don,
I have very much appreciated your words of support and encouragement. Your sense of humor was much needed during a very stressful time.
Thank you, Don.
Patrick
Hello oskosh,
I appreciate your comments and understand the irony you are conveying.
Thank you.
Patrick
Totally agree, LRM. Thank you for the note.
Patrick
Hello Tony,
In some worlds, I guess, the scammers not only kill the messenger, they also kill the server, thus denying both the voice and the ability to project it.
In any event, the server logs were preserved and are being studied. It turns out that a lot of people take the 1st Amendment seriously and are not enthusiastic when speech is stifled by bringing down a server.
Thanks for the note.
Patrick
Thank you for the note, Lisa. It’s too soon to say anything conclusively. Personally I believe the line of suspects is not very long.
Patrick
Hi alasycia,
I appreciate your note. Thank you.
Our entire editorial well of more than 950 stories and thousands of comments from readers went missing for four days. No one could access any of the links, including the links that led to court documents, graphics and other sources of research.
Hearing-impaired readers, for example, could not access our reports on Noobing and Imperia. Senior citizens could not access our reports on various scams targeted at them. People of faith could not access our reports on various scams targeted at them.
No one could access our reports on any of the actions undertaken by the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the IRS, the SEC, the CFTC, the FTC, state and provincial regulators, state AGs and state and local law enforcement as a result of various investigations.
Apparently a criminal or group of criminals thought it best to bring down the PP Blog in the name of scam profits. It can be a strange, strange world.
Thanks for your note.
Patrick
Good to see your blog back Patrick.. Everyone who helps to fight financial fraud counts and this blog counts a lot
Whoohooo your backkkkkkkkkkkkkkk. So happy I could go beyond a giggle.
Patrick:
Does this mean that I now can empty my mailbox of all the emails that I normally send your way?
Hello Jack,
No, it does not mean that. I read all of the emails you send along, and the Blog’s coverage of events has in no way been influenced by the attacks.
Readers should not make the leap that, if a story does not appear quickly and if they do not get a personal response to an inquiry, that the Blog has no plans eventually to publish a story.
Thanks for the note, Jack.
Patrick