Famous Smoke Problems - email recieved

[Cigar Man Andy]

This is a copy of an email I received today explaining what happened to Famous smokes.


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[SIZE=+1]Breaking News from Famous Smoke Shop[/SIZE]

Dear Andrew Scharfman,
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.
www.famous-smoke.com

[edogg]

Site is still down for me.

[cummins2500hd]

I received the same email last evening.

Thanks for the post andy!

[Cigar Man Andy]

I was finally able to access it as of this morning.

[DBCcigar]

Damn!

[Mortanis]

DDoSing tobacco retails? In what darkened room is the decision made to attempt to shut down a tobacco retailer? It's like someone seething in anger and finally one day exclaiming "Oh, Coca-Cola will rue the day they ever offered sugar-flavored beverages! Mwahahah!"

DDoS's are no small matter. I manage a hosted server environment with over 500 sites, and we've been hit with a few in the last 2 weeks. Even with hardware dedicated to handling SYN Flood attacks, it's been extremely problematic. I feel for them.

[Nickerson]

Originally Posted by Mortanis

DDoSing tobacco retails? In what darkened room is the decision made to attempt to shut down a tobacco retailer? It's like someone seething in anger and finally one day exclaiming "Oh, Coca-Cola will rue the day they ever offered sugar-flavored beverages! Mwahahah!"

DDoS's are no small matter. I manage a hosted server environment with over 500 sites, and we've been hit with a few in the last 2 weeks. Even with hardware dedicated to handling SYN Flood attacks, it's been extremely problematic. I feel for them.

Indeed. There are companies that offer DDoS protection services, but their prices vary based on the traffic your site recieves, and it is HIGHLY expensive. I know websites like webhostingtalk uses it.

[mrreindeer]

thanks Andy!

[Jack Straw]

Damn, things must be rough in the cigar industry. Maybe it was a secret league of B&Ms with an evil plot to steal businsess from the online giants? LOL

[2Curious]

There were many more cigar sites targeted, not just the big guys...very creepy.

I started a list of ones I know of, anyone know of any others?
The Monster is Back

[Jack Straw]

I wonder if it was anti-smokers?

[Rev2010]

Guys... if it were anti-smokers do you think they'd focus on cigar vendors?? Most of those nutbags focus solely on cigarette companies. And from what it seems Philip Morris and the other big sellers websites weren't hit.

Think about it... to me it seems more like some competitor had this done to possibly drive additional revenue to their site. Just seems the most obvious thing to me. And not all the big sites were hit. Holt's, Atlantic Cigar, JR Cigars, and a number of others were unaffected. I am NOT suggesting one of those company's had anything to do with it. Just pointing out that there were plenty unaffected.


Rev.

[Nismo#12]

Genetically Engineered Tobacco Beetles from Space (or Area 51). They were trying to delay shipments so they could infest the cigar supply.



But more seriously, it was very un-cool who-ever or what-ever caused it.

[madurolover]

My guess would be that is was some script-kiddies who found a vulnerability they could exploit.