We’re getting in touch to ask for your support in defending us from a malicious and illegal attack that we’re facing. You may have noticed some brief down on Thursday afternoon (10/12/2015). This was caused by an organisation who call themselves the Armada Collective. This group carried out a DDoS attack on our servers for approximately 45 minutes. At the time of this attack, they contacted us to demand we pay them a large sum of money. They stated they would resume their attack on Monday should they not receive payment before then. Having investigated the group it is very clear that even if we were to pay them (something we would never consider) the attacks would not cease. In fact, whenever anyone has given in and paid them, the attacks get worse and the demands increase. Please note, a DDoS attack prevents your site from appearing online, but does not compromise your website data.
Since receiving the threat we have been working tirelessly to put in place any and all protection possible. We’ve also expedited a number of projects that will offer us long term protection from future attacks. We’re confident that we can fend off these attackers, but we do need your help.
How you can help us (and yourself!)
You can help us fight this attack, and at the same time protect your own site, by carrying out the steps below. Making these changes will push the traffic for your website site through a service that protects against the type of attack we are being threatened with. There’s also an added benefit that it will make your website faster to load and more reliable. This was a change we were planning to make in the new year anyway, this event has simply pushed it up the to-do list!
The steps you need to carry out to make changes vary depending on your domain provider (no changes are required if Moonfruit host your domain). We’ve included links to instructions for a number of the main providers in the guides section below. The specific changes you need to make are as follows:
Change the Top Level A record (may be called an @ / Apex / Bare / Root record) to 93.184.220.23
Change the www record type to CNAME, and set the value to cdn.sitemakerlive.com. (including the ‘.’ at the end)