Very Important Announcement:
UPDATE 8/26/08: We are setting up an alternate environment where those of you who have already registered your auction can safely use our software. Please look out for an email very soon with instructions. Thank you.
As many of you know, we have been having severe technical difficulties over the last seven days. We have recently concluded that FantasyAuctioneer has been under a Denial of Service Attack (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_service). What does this mean? Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article:
“[it] generally consists of the concerted, malevolent efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently...One common method of attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable.”
In the past, we have suffered interruptions in service due to inaccurate load tests leading us to allow too many concurrent auctions. This year, we set the number of concurrent auctions to a level well below what we have handled in the past (i.e., instead of relying on load tests, we used historical capacity). Despite a relatively low number of concurrent auctions, the amount of web traffic our front servers registered each day of the last week has been off the charts. Nonsensical server requests were registered coming from thousands of different IP addresses (e.g., loading and reloading the FAQ pages over and over and over again) at a pace that far surpassed any reasonable expectations based on the number of auctions we allowed.
Who could be doing this? Your guess is as good as ours. It might be a new or emerging competitor with a copycat software or perhaps one of the people who have / will be offering to buy our company at pennies for a dollar. Or it could be a bored 13-year old hacker, who knows. The only things we can say are the following:
1. We are very sorry for these problems. Believe me, you have no idea.
2. We will refund your fee(s). Please be patient with us as we have a mountain of refunds to process. We promise that you will get your money back.
3. At the moment, we are still trying to figure out a way to prevent these attacks. Until we come up with a satisfactory solution, please use our website at your own risk. There is only so much we can do in terms of customer service should we get hit again. You may use the promo codes "DOS1", "DOS2", "DOS3", "DOS4", and so on to set up a free private auction should you so choose.
Please look for more updates here on the homepage of the website. Thank you.
-The FantasyAuctioneer Team
