The Monster is Back

[jadeg001]

Cigar Monster is running again, first time I've seen it in days.

[Mustard]

this a c/p from another site. hope it"s cool to do so.

Many of our customers have been wondering why our websites have been slow or inaccessible for the past five days. The problem was due to a targeted Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, similar to what has recently been happening to some large government websites, financial institutions, and e-commerce sites in the U.S. and abroad. For those of you who do not know what a "DDoS" is and what it is not, I will briefly explain. First and foremost, no one's personal data has been compromised. I want to assure you that all your personal data is safe, protected and intact.

So what is DDoS? These attacks occur when a flood of traffic is deliberately sent to a particular website in an effort to overwhelm the site and prevent legitimate users from getting through. This is exactly what occurred over the last five days to famous-smoke.com and to some of our competitors in the premium cigar industry. WE ARE NOW BACK, and I have taken steps to ensure that this cyber terrorism will never happen to Famous Smoke Shop again:

We have contracted with experts in the internet security industry to mitigate the attack, and our website was successfully brought back on line Sunday evening. Our security consultants will continue to monitor our network traffic to combat the continued attacks. In partnership with our security consultants, we have performed exhaustive security audits of our networks, servers and websites. Again, I want to reiterate that in no way was our security breached or our data compromised. Although the attackers were successful in generating enough traffic to bring our websites down, we were not "hacked," and all of your personal data has been, and continues to remain, secure.

Like many of you, until a few days ago, I had never heard of DDoS, nor did I understand how widespread this problem has become in the ecommerce sector, how vulnerable we were, or what the consequences of such cyber terrorism would be. Had all retail cigar websites been affected, as some others were, your online cigar supply lines would have been severed completely.

Unfortunately for me, while this disaster was occurring, I was in Nicaragua and Honduras, and did not fully understand what was happening to my company. You can only imagine my frustration. All I was thinking about was creating new products for my customers, and I'm pleased to report that we have some excellent new surprise cigars on the way.

Thankfully, right now our company is functioning normally again. We were attacked. Jealous competitor? Anti-smoking terrorist? It's impossible to know at this point. Suffice to say, we are doing everything in our power to get to the bottom of it. Moreover, because of the deliberate targeting of our industry, and the scale and duration of the attack, Federal authorities have taken an active interest in pursuing the attackers and we intend to cooperate fully.

Even more frustrating was being unable to communicate and inform you about the situation until now, since our email was out of action as well. Therefore, I apologize to all of you, my valued customers, for the inconvenience and the silence.

Sincerely,

Arthur Zaretsky
President,
Famous Smoke Shop-PA, Inc.

[baba]

I just got an email from them. They were jamed with fake emails which caused a "denile of service" problem, and shut them down

[Koolpsych]

Thats lame. I wonder why someone would target them? Anti-smokers?

[2Curious]

My friend's site was also attacked cuencacigars.com, so it wasn't restricted to a few major sites, looks like many many of them were targeted. And it wasn't just email, it was full-on multiple ip sourced ddos attack sending massive traffic to the site's ip and dns server ip. Lasted for days. So even the company and server who was hosting her site was attacked. (Anyone associated with cigar company).
Cost money, smaller companies like her's can't affford to loose. Not to mention new customers who just bought something, then check back and site is down, freaking out. Not good.
All back up now, but it's been a long week for her.

So anyone know of how many sites got hit?
Here is the list I know so far, if you know of others please post. I'm really curious now, how wide this attack was.

famous-smoke.com
cigarbid.com
cigarsinternational.com
cigarmonster.com
cuencacigars.com
cigarplace.biz
joecigar.com

[mugzy]

Bout time. I never buy much from the Monster however I visit the site several times a day to see whats up there....

[baba]

I tried again last evening - still down

[Tarks]

Yup. It was up last night and now its down. Boooooooooo!

[Warren]

DDoS isn't new and a good network team should be able to fix it. There is really no excuse for these guys being down this long. Someone isn't doing their job.

[sboyajian]

agreed Warren. A quality network admin should not only be able to resolve the problem in a couple hours, but by days end should be able to prevent it's happening again.

That being said, a company with that much web traffic really shouldn't be doing email administration on the same box as their webserver.