Religious Persecution or Dumb Coincidence?

[Brother Zag]

Thought I'd ask you smart folks what you think.

My website for my third book, "Vatican Abdicator", is under attack.

Began last night around 10pm EDT, a denial of service attack.

Yes, www.vaticanabdicator.com came under cyber attack on the eve of the Pope's visit to the US. So either it's a random coincidence, or someone is messing with the site because it has "vatican" in its title...

The conspiracy theorist in me sees mad papist hackers at work...

Strangely, my other sites are fine, vaticanassassin.com and vaticanambassador.com. I've been told this is because I'm using the provider's blog software for vaticanabdicator.com, making it vulnerable to this type of attack.

I'm not sure what I can do about this. I feel like my freeedom of speech is under attack, like I'm being religiously persecuted. The service provider says they're working on it:

What is occurring is that some person(s) with malicious intent has
organized an attack on your particular web server flooding it with
false requests overwhelming the server's ability to respond to
normal requests causing slow response from server or no reponse at
all.

Our network engineers are currently dealing with this problem and
trying to identify the source and to block the attack at this time.
As well, we will be notifying the authorities of this crime very
shortly.

We thank you for your understanding in this situation. We are still
working hard to resolve this matter.

Thoughts?

[Mladen]

Yeah, definately sounds like more than a coincidence.

Either you were targeted by anti-Catholics (Church of England? Other protestants? Muslims? Richard Dawkins?), or by Catholics themselves who thought your book name was offensive.

Regardless, what an enormous waste of time and effort for everybody involved (including the spammers themselves... seriously, NOTHING better to do?). Its just pointless vandalism from the hands of emotionally stunted sociopathic idiots, I wouldn't get too hung up about it.

[Brother Zag]

Well, all's well now... site's back up and available. No word from my provider as to who or what caused this DOS attack.

Curious.

[badMike]

DOS attacks are pretty common by hackers. Do you have a shared hosting site or are you on a dedicated server? Your provider said your server was under attack, not your site. So, depending on how you're hosted matters in figuring this out.

I also don't know what kind of access logs your host keeps, but if you can view them and you can figure out roughly when the DOS attack began, you can use that info to see if it was your site was being targeted or the server. If it was just your site being attacked, you could find out the IP address of the hacker doing this and at least prevent them from doing it again with an .htaccess file.

But, as I said DOS attacks are fairly common. While trying to prevent a massive one, my hosting company ended up blocking all access to all their servers for about 12-14 hours one night last month. It happens.

I would say this is a coincidence, but anything's possible. You'll probably get little info out of your hosting service unfortunately. It's not like they want to spread the info of how this was done and they'll never know the why.

But, getting hacked is upsetting. It's happened to me. It's an awful feeling.