We are BACK

[Andrea B.]

Finally made it back! Turns out our router needed a reboot & reset to clear up everything.

Richard, the attack was not directed at Nikongear. It was a general denial-of-service attack by a hacker group in the US directed against an internet backbone group in the US. The hacker group also took over many devices like web cams, laptops, and routers. Nikongear was simply "collateral damage".

[jhinkey]

I spent a few hours last night trying to make Site5 support understand what mess they had created for us. Even their LiveChat didn't function well. For example, communication literally was one-way only. Quite frustrating.

The first hours were a waste of time, due to the smart-alecks answering my chat messages. That the hosting provider was responsible for the mess was beyond their wildest imagination. Only when a female support tech came online did we see progress. She understood immediately what was wrong and worked for about 1 hour to get all bits and pieces to their correct position.

Now, ordinary DNS name resolution should work. Do flush your resolver cache if you cannot connect through an alias such as nikongear.com or nikongear.org. The www prefix will work later, not now, but is really superfluous.

For those of you using the HOSTS hack, no harm is done by just leaving the file as is. If we move to another IP or hosting company we surely will announce that well ahead of the change.

Do note the new DNS propagation might take a few hours. Tomorrow everything should be back to normal.

I have a bottle of Laphroaig whisky from my birthday celebration somewhere. Off now to open it.

Thanks for all the unnecessary hard work to bring the site back.
Hopefully, in the future, it will be possible to hunt down the entities responsible for such DDOS attacks and put them in jail as this is a form of very expensive vandalism in the cyber space of today's world.
Plus, I hope international standards for device security are placed on the manufacturers of these cheap connected devices to help prevent this from happening in the future.

[Andrea B.]

A lot of the problem with home devices is that their owners never change the factory password. So these devices remain very easy to hack. I hope our members here are very careful with any device which they put "online". Factory passwords are often phrases like "1234" or "password".

Even though our wireless router has a strong password and was not taken over during the DoS attack, it seemed to get hung up a couple of times. A reboot cleared up everything fortunately.

[Akira]

I received storm of notification emails possibly on hold during the down time.   

[John G]

On my commute now, with NG on the CellPhone.
Bloody Marvelous. 😁

[Thomas G]

Nice. Welcome Back!

[Jørgen Ramskov]

A lot of the problem with home devices is that their owners never change the factory password. So these devices remain very easy to hack. I hope our members here are very careful with any device which they put "online". Factory passwords are often phrases like "1234" or "password".

That is, I believe, what they take advantage of. I don't really think it is the users fault, they don't know better, but the manufacturers of these devices should make sure their devices never showed up on the internet with a default password. We have regulations for a lot of other stuff, but in the IT world it's the wild west.

[FriskoKry]

Thanks for all the work you've put into getting back NG to the world (or vice versa).

Ardbeg is not far away. Skål Björn!

[Jan Anne]

Just to add thanks to Jan Anne who was also providing hacking tips in the background, and there was one time when only he was online

That was indeed a very surreal experience, like a virtual equivalent of walking through a ghost town 

[Akira]

Good job, Jan!

[MILLIREHM]

Good to have you back. Thanks for all the efforts behind

[Frank Fremerey]

After days of flaws and quirks, this evening the sever is very responsive and everything seems to work fine as it did before the crash. Thank you again.

[Bent Hjarbo]

To day I have intermittent problems getting access to the site, well just now I an connected ;-)

[Bjørn Rørslett]

No reports on connectivity issues in the server log. In fact, even well before the end of the month, we have an all-time high visitors record !!

Apart from flushing your browser cache, at present I can offer no further advice. If problems persist, do notify us.

[Bent Hjarbo]

It seems to be a strange thing with MacOS and Safari, I can use Firefox on the Mac. But it will connect at times even with Safari.
On my Linux laptop, as I am writing on now it works as well.