databreaches.net "didn't lose anything." There Was a DDoS Attack.
THE other night we took note of the fact that databreaches.net had mysteriously changed and all the pages were 'gone', except perhaps one. Sometimes we got error pages instead, so something was amiss. I reached out to the person who runs the site and the person wrote: "No, it didn't lose anything."
So that likely means no data breach and no loss of data, so we can (or could) only hypothesise. Police involvement? A potential lawsuit? No evidence of that, it would be purely a conjecture.
For now we can only (and could only) float some theories in IRC, but we have no definitive answers. Trying to load any page, e.g. this recent one, resulted in nothing, so the general public lost access to a lot of material. Pretty much every request would lead to the same page.
Right?
No.
There's some CDN or DNS cache mystery. Or maybe browser cache in Firefox.
Did the webmaster receive a legal threat, compelling this person to take down pages? No, absolutely not.
A day ago I said: "Just need a canary here, like silence..."
"That page works fine," I've just been told. "My site is up and fine. Attached is a screencap of my home page as it appears now after the morning update. If you don't see that on your browser, try clearing your cache. Clicking on any of the links to posts goes to those posts as it should. I think the RSS feed is not right yet and have to check into that, but the site itself is fine."
"There has been no legal threat. Just an annoying DDoS attack that I had to deal with."
I had to solve some JavaScript riddles to get back into the site. So basically it seems like a DDoS attack resulted in adaptations and changes that locked some people out and the RSS feed remains dysfunctional. We find solace in the fact there was no security breach and no legal threat, either. █