Summary: Status report on the site's issues today

Some readers have noticed and have reported to us site access issues (downtime or other difficulties). I personally have spent all day today (since 7AM and more so after 1PM) combating a bizarre kind of DDOS attack, which always came from the same network, owned by Lockheed Martin Corporation. I can say so with certainty. I spent many hours trying to tackle and properly investigate this.

I do not know what motivates this and whether some machines at the Lockheed Martin network (Fairfield, Connecticut, United States) got compromised, but all I know is that for one reason or another someone wants to drive the servers out of memory and knock the site offline. These attacks have been pretty persistent over the past 8 hours. ⬆