>In the last six weeks, we have been trying to find the source of the denial of service which was made against the Universal Thread site. This has been the most difficult issue so far we had to deal with in regards to security issue about the site. We have made some adjustments targeted at collecting more data, made a lot of verifications about the infrastructure and so on. During that timeframe, this was causing the site to be overloaded and it was coming up back by itself within a range of 2 to 6 minutes, the time it took to process all the backlogs. A month ago, I mentioned online that this was caused by an external resource. We were not able to provide more information on this because we needed to catch it and adjust after.
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>I would like to mention that this kind of situation is really sad. Whoever was being this, they should know that this cost us a lot of money, time and effort. We are still pretty sure about the reason for this. Some individuals on this planet should know that this is something very bad to do. When someone is off the site, this decision should be respected as is. But, doing this kind of action, is totally unacceptable. This has hurt our image, our members and who ever is involved in the good running of the site, which also includes our customers.
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>Not to forget that we are presently in a middle of some very difficult times and we are all trying in the best we can to continue to support and use this site. This behavior happened during the worst period we have ever had to deal with in regards to a financial crisis and the related individual should have also taken that in consideration. This demonstrates that some individuals on this planet have absolutely no moral at all and no respect for people around them. The pattern I have observed and the point of original are related to the recent situations. We cannot confirm if it goes back to several months but for sure during the last few weeks. The pattern was also happening on occasional basis instead of an automatic pattern. Thus, we were ok for 8 to 15 days then it was coming back several times a day. This is what has triggered our attention that our infrastructure was ok and that it was caused by an external source. Note also that we have other sites running on the same server with the same infrastructure. And, they were not affected by that and have never suffered from such action. Thus, IIS to the site itself was related, thus the Universal Thread only.
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>We are very sorry about that situation. We hope this was all that was related to it. If there would be more related situations, we would do our best to rectify it as soon as possible. We just hope this has resolved it for a very long time.

I remember some people here were complaining about intermittent poor response from UT. I'm glad you were able to track this down and address it.

So, it sounds like you think the attack(s) were coming from a banned member. Any such member won't be chastised by the message, only members in good standing can see it. So, really, you are telling the community that a banned member instigated the DoS attacks.

Can you tell us the identity of this member?

If not:

1. There have been more than 1 recent banned members - Kevin Goff and Jay Johengen, to name two. If you don't tell us who you think it is, the other former member(s) will have their reputations damaged unjustly, with no way to reply or clear their names on this forum.

2. If I were to post unsubstantiated allegations of improper or illegal activities in a post on this forum, you would probably - and should - reprimand me for violating terms of service. So, if you don't back up your allegations with names and facts, you are arguably violating the terms of service of your own site.

Maybe your lawyer has advised you against publishing specifics about the attacks. If so, you could have limited your post to a technical explanation, such as, "Due to intermittent bursts of unexpected heavy traffic from our ISP..."