STATEMENT: Another Unusual Event At PP Blog

Yesterday, beginning at approximately 11:09 p.m., the PP Blog’s operations were affected by a swarm of sudden visitors. The swarm caused an outage that lasted for approximately 30 minutes.

The vast majority of the visitors displayed non-U.S. IPs, and sought to pull a range of “old” stories or archived files. It is believed the event was engineered robotically. Logs suggest that almost all of the visitors never previously had appeared at the Blog.

Last night’s event was the most recent in a series of unusual events in which international IPs swarmed the Blog. The PP Blog is published in the United States. Most of its traffic originates in the United States.

On March 27 — a Sunday — the Blog recorded a brief unusual event. In Sunday’s event, a small number of IPs sent unusually long command strings to the Blog’s server. One such string included 3,283 characters. Normal command strings are far, far smaller. Other visitors also sought to send exceptionally lengthy commands. The 3,283-character string appears to have been a bid to summon the same “old” story multiple times simultaneously. The story referenced the AdSurfDaily case and the now-defunct pro-ASD Surf’s Up forum.

The events of Sunday and yesterday followed on the heels of unusual events that occurred on March 9 and March 22. The unusual event that occurred on March 9 also featured a bid to send exceptionally lengthy command strings to the server. In the March 9 incident, multiple visitors with international IPs sought to pull simultaneously a story about the MPB Today “grocery” MLM and an unrelated story about a Ponzi scheme in New Jersey.

Like last night’s event, the unusual event of March 22 featured the sudden appearance of dozens and dozens of international IPs simultaneously. An early analysis of last night’s event suggests the sudden swarm delivered traffic at a rate of more than 63 times the Blog’s ordinary volume.

A sudden swarm of visitors with international IPs appeared at the PP Blog, beginning at approximately 11:09 p.m. (EDT) on March 28, 2011.