Aliens Attack Hogeschool Wittenborg Websites

Since Sunday, the Wittenborg Websites have been under attack by unknown forces, using a so called DDOS, or Distributed Denial of Service, Attack. This has meant that the websites of Wittenborg Online, Wittenborg NL, Wittenborg EU, and Wittenborg ASIA, have often been unreachable for normal users.

Also affected have been the companies Continext, EUSina, Pipeliner-Sales, Study Link Europe, and BTC, who as Wittenborg business partners also use the Wittenborg servers. Also affected was the cultural site of www.terwolde.com, and its Jazz site www.jazz.terwlde.com which Wittenborg sponsors.

Wittenborg’s IT team have been successful in securing the servers and the current attack has been slowed by a combination of firewall, anti-DDOS scripts and a manual interjections of code during the height of the attacks, which was required to keep down-time to a minimum. There is no guarantee that the attacks will stop, or that they will not cause more downtime in the future.

If you are still affected:

During the fight against the DDOS attack, the firewall was highly sensitive and some users were unintentionally banned. If this happened to you, and is still the case (Wittenborg sites are unavailable), please email Wittenborg to have your ip address removed from the blocking firewall! Email your removal request to ddos@wittenborg dot nl and we will get back to you asap. Thanks!

According to WikiPedia:

“A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers .

One common method of attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.”