Our Cagle.com site was down yesterday afternoon with a massive “DDoS Zombie” hacker attack.  I’m not sure where they came from this time, but in the past we’ve traced them to China.  I drew this cartoon with China looking over my shoulder, at the time of an earlier attack.  A “zombie” attack, like the one we suffered yesterday, is one that uses multiple automated scripts; a DDoS is a “distributed denial of service” attack which attempts to flood the server with requests in order to deny it’s ability to serve content or interrupt service. Yesterday we suffered a huge flood of automated zombie requests.

Cagle.com is blocked by the government of Iran, and I’m sure we have some enemies around the world, but I think the attacks we continue to suffer come from criminals.  We’ve had hackers insert malware/viruses onto Cagle.com, and we’ve been pretty good about getting that down as soon as it goes up – still, it is jarring.  Most often I think the attacks are fishing for ways in to our server, to search for any information, like credit card numbers, that have some value to the worldly crooks.

Just so that all of you hackers out there know, we don’t keep credit card information online.  When we have repeating charges for syndicate subscribers, we write the credit card information on a piece of paper, with a pen, and enter it manually into Paypal each month.  We don’t store the credit information anywhere digitally.  When hackers attack us, all they will find are our cartoons, that are already on display on the Web.

So, please, go attack someone else.