Handsomeharry (or anyone, for that matter, doesn’t need his own botnet. You can “rent” one for a few hundred dollars. Seriously, the kind of attack SDMB experienced could be done by a hacker using a botnet without breaking a sweat.
Anyone wanting to “get back” at a website just needs to find the right dark corner of the internet, pay in bitcoins, and someone in Romania/Brazil/Turkey unleashes the Bots of Hell on the chosen target.
You know, you’re the kind of scum who makes it even worse to live in this world than the likes of handsomeharry do.
“Nothing conclusive”? Nothing. You made it up out of thin air.
“… it did make me wonder”? There is nothing to make you wonder. You have no evidence.
You don’t even have anything to make a guess. While the “no smoke without fire” crowd is bad enough, you don’t even have smoke. You’re just trying to make yourself seem smart and on top of things by inventing accusations out of whole cloth.
This is why so many people across the country find their lives being made miserable: because shithead, brain dead, malicious little twerps like you just can’t resist making themselves feel important.
Who would have suspected. Frank is a nazi sympathiser.
Exhibit A) handsome “harry”, if that’s his real name is a nazi
Exhibit B) leftfield just said you can rent a botnet for hundreds of dollars
Exhibit C) BigT just told me that nazis are often behind hack attacks plus we all know they are rich.
A+B+C = Frank and handsomeharry hacked the board. No need for Nuremberg just ban the bastards!
It is true that, when someone publicly accuses themself of something much worse than causing a temporary message board outage, any such suggestions from other Dopers seem like a pointless waste of time.
I know, low-hanging fruit. Just sayin’.
Yikes, let me clarify. I did not mean to imply that I KNEW it was handsomeharry. I wanted to add to the conversation the fact that anyone with a few dollars to spare can unleash a botnet.
I work in the cyber security field. If this was an attack of the nature as described in one of Eds posts, it is very easy to do. Usually harmless in the long run, but if any of you had a dictionary word as your password, please immediately change it, as well as any other site you use the same user name password combo.
Seriously, my bet is it’s someone who doesn’t like pop unders.
Pop unders w/o pictures of nekkid wimen? I thought it was only porn, or skeevy clickbait, that used them. I didn’t think the SDMB was either.
Trust me, it’s nothing to tell your grandkids about.
Let me try to give you a bit of the flavor, though. You know what a spambot is? It’s an automated routine that manages to be sophisticated enough to get past the captcha barriers, creates a guest account, and posts threads in one or more forums which consist of links to sites of dubious legality/safety, often offering to give you the ability to livestream soccer games from Romania, or something.
Now, one of the duties of the mods is to respond to reports of spambots, ban the usernames, delete the threads, and during times of high spambot activity, look around for the next bot.
If they didn’t do this, the forum thread lists would be littered with threads that have ZERO EXCUSE for existing, but some of which have an intriguing thread title, tempting the unwary to open them. And there’s no guarantee that these threads would all sink to the bottom automatically; even around here, we have some idiots who think it’s funny to take a potshot at a troll, and the “troll” being a bot doesn’t necessarily deter them.
So, imagine the mods didn’t do anything about spambots. It would be a mess, right? And for many Dopers who actually care about and contribute to the quality of the board, it would become a PITA to come here, only to have to sift through the spam to find content.
Now imagine that the spambots were all created by flesh-and-blood users from some other online community, who have decided, in sufficiently large numbers, that the content on the SDMB has, by its very existence, provoked them to come over here, create guest accounts for themselves, and fill the forums up with threads that contribute nothing to the quality of the board’s content. In most cases, they could be banned for trolling, right? Sure, but not before being given the benefit of the doubt, reminders to read the registration agreement and comport themselves accordingly, and one or more warnings, AND a certain percentage of them would try to come back as socks, forcing the entire process to begin again.
THAT’S what a board war looks like. Like I said, not something you want to experience just so you can tell your grandkids about it.
You’ve been whooshed, son. Doesn’t the cyber security field have whooshing? 
Not whooshed, but CarnalK’s post made me go back and read my original post, which, upon second reading, did seem to say that I thought handsomeharry was a likely suspect. Not saying that at all. Just sayin’ a DOS or brute force attack is incredibly easy to do.
Also, just a desire not be associated with BigT.
I wonder how many posters went looking for their kids and then realized they graduated, moved out and started families of their own?
Non sequitur? 
Didn’t read the rest of the thread. This seemed like the right place to post this:
I’m very annoyed at the people who are whining and complaining about the stuff that’s still not working quite right on the restored SDMB.
I DON’T mean people who are helpfully and neutrally informing us and the mods that (for example) “BTW, multi-quote is still not working,” or “I had to log in 1,349 times.” I DON’T MEAN THESE PEOPLE.
I mean the ones who say stuff like (not quoting specifics or naming names), “The fuckin’ multi-quote function is stlll fucked up!” and “I STILL have to log in 1,349 times!! When are they going to get this mother FIXED??” :mad:
I feel like saying, “The kidnappers have just returned your mother with only a bad haircut and mismatched shoes, and all you can say is, 'Mom! Why isn’t dinner on the table yet?? And we’re out of beer! Couldn’t you have asked the FBI to stop at the store on the way home? Holy shit, mom! Get with the program.’”
The board was down for less than 24 hours (seemed like 90*) and it’s back up and mostly working. Quitcher bitchin’! :rolleyes:
Fuck that! While the Board was down, I had to do work! :eek:
a problem of one day accessing a messageboard, you call a Great Outtage? It explains very much…
I do. What else am I gonna think about when I masturbate.
Dammit, multiquote still not working…and editing tags not working now either, for me…at least not like I expected them to work
kaylasdad, thanks for the info, yeah sounds pretty lame and not nearly as romantic or exciting as the term “board wars” implies, except if you’re a mod or admin perhaps
and screw it, I don’t need the multiqote for this post after all.
Obviously. That’s why this thread is called “The Great Outage”. If you thought it was called something else you may have been hallucinating. It refers to the fact that a board that always runs 24/7 and is very rarely down was unavailable for around 24 hours and I’m sure that a lot of people worked very hard to bring it back online.
It may indeed explain a lot, but what is the question?
BTW, in order to maintain in good standing my credentials as grammar Nazi and spelling fascist, I am required to inform you that there is only one “t” in “outage”.
More like 30 hours. Small difference I realize, but you try remaining in a fetal position, suffering withdrawal pains, not eating or drinking, profusely sweating and experiencing heart beat irregularities for 30 friggen hours.
That’s exactly what I DID do!
Of course it was a “Great” outage.
For a full 30 hours I didn’t hear one bullshit thing on the Dope from anyone that I felt compelled to bitch about and or tell them how damn wrong and stupid they were.
It was like I was finally at peace with the Dope for the first time in my life.
It WAS great.