14 DAY TRIAL // The Dirty, a website that offers users the possibility to post morally questionable news, gossip and photos, has been knocked offline by what is believed to be a prolonged distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
The website has been down for weeks and Nik Richie, its owner, has called in the FBI to investigate the matter that is persisting for weeks.
Website is in CloudFlare network
At the moment, it is unclear if hackers or a technical issue is at fault, but Richie, Hooman Abedi Karamian by his real name, is said to have already lost at least $250,000 / €216,000 this month because he could not display Super Bowl advertisements, according to TMZ.
A DDoS attack consists in directing large amounts of traffic from different computer systems towards a targeted IP address, exhausting the resources of the machine functioning under that address.
Most of the times, this type of attack lasts for a few hours and more sustained ones can hit the target for a few days. However, DDoS services are rented from individuals that have enslaved the machines sending packets to the target; as such, a prolonged attack requires some pretty money.
In the case of The Dirty, the website is protected by CloudFlare, which acts as a proxy between the visitor and the actual server hosting the site. With no direct connection to the server, the attackers need to know the IP address of the target.
Changing the DNS records may be part of the solution
On the other hand, trying to load the site causes CloudFlare to display a DNS-related error informing that the DNS points to an IP that generates a conflict.
The suggested action is for the owner of the website to log into his CloudFlare account and change the DNS A records so that they point to a different IP address, one that is preferably not in the same file zone.
“Pointing your service to another proxy in your zone file. Since CloudFlare is also a reverse proxy, enabling our proxy on a record may create a cyclic loop,” the description of the error reads.
In the case of a DDoS attack on The Dirty’s webserver, a different error would be displayed, indicating that CloudFlare system could not reach the host.
Nik Richie is convinced that hackers are the culprits and that they targeted the website because of the content displayed. “These hackers are hypocrites. My website promotes free speech,” he told TMZ.