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Adblocker Blockers

By on October 17, 2007

Apparently I ruffled a few feathers by blocking AdBlockers… OCMS had a Denial of Service attack distributed from about 20 different computers.  They were all attacking the same file, the one that serves up ads.  As soon as I changed the target file the site was running fine again.

 
I have banned these users from accessing the site and am taking measures to prevent this from happening again.  I am also looking into litigation against those who participated in the attack, since their IPs were logged and I can contact their ISPs.
 
Just goes to show how “entitled” some people think they are to “free” webpages.  How DARE I try to make money to pay the hosting bills?
I’ve identified some of the attackers, and some of the IPs match up with some forum members, who have been subsequently banned from the site and the forums.

The evidence overwhelmingly identifies some of these people. I’m not sure if I’m going to turn the logs over to the authorities or not.

Well I reduced the timeout for connection hangs, and have protected the files that serve the ads.

FOr some reason the script is broken after I put protection in place, so I will probably do the “Borg” method of serving ads… randomly generate a URL that serves the ads, so even if they specifically block it the URL will change in 30 seconds. The only way to block the ad is to filter out the entire site, which means they wouldn’t see ANY content.

I am my own ISP… the server is in a datacenter, so I blocked the IPs at the IIS level.  They have some advanced routers so I’m somewhat protected, but they recommend a dedicated hardware firewall.

I need to get a hardware firewall though, and don’t have much experience with “real” professional equipment. I used a consumer “Internet router” once but it dropped like 50% of my traffic. A hardware firewall is very expensive, so I was thinking about building one. It should support VPN, NAT (and defend against DDoS of course).

Alan is a web architect, stand-up comedian, and your friendly neighborhood Grammar Nazi. You can stalk him on the Interwebs via Google+, Facebook and follow his ass on Twitter @ocmodshop.
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