10.21.16

Disruption to Site’s Service

Posted in Site News at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A technical note about why Techrights has not been publishing many articles recently

WE HAVE A LOT to publish (drowning in material). We have a lot to publish specifically about the EPO, but I am home-bound due to the site being overloaded with crap traffic (some things cannot be automated and must be done manually in order to keep the site available). A series we are trying to publish (see part one and its addendum) is well overdue, but as I stated a couple of nights ago, it is difficult to even keep the site online (since just over a week ago when the Kongstad series had hit the Danish press). The site is having severe issues whenever I go to sleep and I have had to cancel many things, making a lot of personal sacrifices for this. I slept only 2 hours 2 nights ago.

We are, sooner or later, going to publish all that we intended to publish. All this mess only makes me ever more eager to get it out of the way (or put it out in the open).

Some people ask us about the issues. One message we received a few hours ago said: “I notice that there are a lot of 503 messages with Varnish at Techrights lately. I suppose that is because of a DDoS of the backend server or just of key daemons (esp MySQL). The DDoS is usually an indication that you are on the right track and that the recent posts are effective and timely.”

As of today, for example, “European Patent Office” (e.g. 145.64.134.245) is hammering Techrights (IPs are being banned by our defenses, but it’s not enough). As we stated here before, we are not sure if it’s their filtering equipment that does this (we explained the technical reasons it might be so). We’re managing to keep Techrights afloat only by banning lots of IP addresses and it’s usually not enough. My wife and I monitor the server and intervene almost 24/7. I canceled the gym today.

Among the IP addresses banned today for excessive access (requests) we also have 155.201.34.7, which belongs to:

NetRange: 155.201.0.0 – 155.201.255.255
CIDR: 155.201.0.0/16
NetName: PRWATERHOUSE
NetHandle: NET-155-201-0-0-1
Parent: NET155 (NET-155-0-0-0-0)
NetType: Direct Assignment
OriginAS:
Organization: PriceWaterhouseCoopers, LLP (PRICEW-16)
RegDate: 1991-11-22
Updated: 2012-02-24
Ref: https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-155-201-0-0-1

“PriceWaterhouseCoopers” is Battistelli’s liars for hire (the so-called ‘social’ ‘study’). They are still hammering the site today, for the second day in a row in fact. Whether it’s abuse or abusive traffic (or excessive requests that may be related to this article which tarnishes their image) we leave others to decide on. “PricewaterhouseCoopers” was automatically banned from the site for traffic abuse, but the addresses keep changing and our system automatically bans them.

We have had yet another IP address auto-banned for traffic floods that render the site unaccessible. Here is the report (notice the number of attempts, in a short period of time):

The IP 155.201.34.7 has just been banned by Fail2Ban after
216 attempts against VARNISH.

&showARIN=false&showNonArinTopLevelNet=false&ext=netref2
#

NetRange: 155.201.0.0 – 155.201.255.255
CIDR: 155.201.0.0/16
NetName: PRWATERHOUSE
NetHandle: NET-155-201-0-0-1
Parent: NET155 (NET-155-0-0-0-0)
NetType: Direct Assignment
OriginAS:
Organization: PriceWaterhouseCoopers, LLP (PRICEW-16)
RegDate: 1991-11-22
Updated: 2012-02-24
Ref: https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-155-201-0-0-1

Also:

The IP 164.143.240.34 has just been banned by Fail2Ban after
183 attempts against VARNISH.

person: DCS Gov
address: PricewaterhouseCoopers UK
address: 161 Marsh Wall
address: Docklands
address: London
address: E14 9SQ
address: United Kingdom
phone: +44 207 583 5000
fax-no: +44 207 212 2921
nic-hdl: DCS17-RIPE
mnt-by: AS1849-MNT
created: 2005-09-09T14:46:07Z
last-modified: 2005-09-09T14:46:07Z
source: RIPE # Filtere

I have to go to work now, but when I finish I intend to work hard (well into the weekend), with the goal is releasing many EPO articles (if the state of the site/server permits). Stay tuned and be sympathetic not to Battistelli and his goons but to those trying hard — at a great personal cost (and pro bono) — to expose them. █

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