Originally Posted by
BearX220
Um, do we know for certain it was a cyber-attack as opposed to homegrown IBB incompetence?
It's not users who access FT, etc. for free that IBB has to answer to; it's advertisers. It's just inexcusable for the whole IBB empire to disappear off the face of the earth for most of a business day.
It showed all the signs of a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack, except that my understanding is that it was a massive attempt at brute-force hacking into their vBulletin databases. The effects from our perspective (as long as the hack is unsuccessful) are the same. DDOS just using massive but normal server requests that overwhelm the servers; the hack has a more specific & sinister intent.
Personally, I would hope that they went along with it (in cooperation with law enforcement) long enough to try to find out who was controlling the bots. Blocking the IP addresses in this situation simply blocks PC's that are already hijacked. You have to go upstream to their ISP's & see where the command & control traffic for the exploited computers is coming from.
Most if not all of the advertisers are pay per click advertisers such as AdSense. They'll miss the boards a lot less than IB will miss the income.