What has happened to the "The Wood Whisperer" webpage?

[Mort Stevens]

Both the main page...

and the video page...

seem to have been hacked!

[Michael Mayo]

Loaded up fine for me??? Looks like the feeds page is the one having issues possibly a hosting company problem with the servers. But you can get to all of the content via the regular webpages.

[Matt Day]

Main page looks okay to me?

[Lewis Ehrhardt]

I don't know this to be true, but seems I read a few days ago, he had been the victim of some type of computer virus or something of that nature. Again, don't know this to be true. Lewis

[Mort Stevens]

Just tried it right now and all I get is a "http://o/" in the upper left corner... hasn't worked for me in over a week. Something must have changed on their end, maybe they're using some sort of fancy javascript stuff, which don't work for me, because looking at their source code it start off with "script language=JavaScript" - Oh, well, too bad, I used to enjoy The Wood Whisperer.

[Bob Lloyd]

According to the forums there, they are under some sort of cyber attack.

[Mike Heidrick]

Another guild attacked them. LOL.

[paul cottingham]

He is the victim of a denial of service attack.
ouch.

[Matt Meiser]

Maybe the Gass or CPSC shut him down because he doesn't own a Sawstop? :D

[Curt Harms]

He is the victim of a denial of service attack.
ouch.
What an interesting choice of target. It'd be hard imagine someone less controversial than Marc.

[Bob Lloyd]

The site seems to be back working OK this morning.

[Jerome Hanby]

What an interesting choice of target. It'd be hard imagine someone less controversial than Marc.

I think there are many cyber delinquents that snoop around for someone using particular software that they know how to hack then they fire away just for fun. I ran a website for a guild of MMORPG players, probably less than 50 active members and someone though it was funny to attack us. Pretty pathetic, really. I had never made any real effort to secure anything because there was nothing there worth securing. Attack was kind of clever, they uploaded the Perl equivalent of the Norton utilities as an attached image (script named with a jpg extension), then tricked the forum software into executing it. Was kind of worth the inconvenience just to see the process. Took me all of 30 minutes to work out what happened and lock that type of attack out.

[Jim Matthews]

I ran a website for a guild of MMORPG players, probably less than 50 active members and someone though it was funny to attack us. Pretty pathetic, really.

Some snarky comment about Trolls set them off, prolly.
Geek fights - Jayzus!

[Steven Lee, NC]

try clearing your browser cache, that might help


Just tried it right now and all I get is a "http://o/" in the upper left corner... hasn't worked for me in over a week. Something must have changed on their end, maybe they're using some sort of fancy javascript stuff, which don't work for me, because looking at their source code it start off with "script language=JavaScript" - Oh, well, too bad, I used to enjoy The Wood Whisperer.

[Jim Rimmer]

I logged on a few minutes ago and it was fine. I didn't know he was having cyber-issues. I just thought the activity on his site had slowed down due to the new arrival at his house.

[John Kali]

I logged on a few minutes ago and it was fine. I didn't know he was having cyber-issues. I just thought the activity on his site had slowed down due to the new arrival at his house.

I think between that, and the work bench he's been pretty busy. Haven't been very many new videos lately :(

[Chris Friesen]

They're under a "distributed denial of service" attack. Basically someone gets a whole bunch of machines to constantly access Marc's site. If the load is high enough it can prevent anyone else from accessing it.

The higher traffic rate also means that Marc's web hosting fees go up dramatically, so he's asked if people were going to buy anything that they consider doing it sooner rather than later to help cover the increased costs until they can switch to a better service provider. (Better ones will help deal with denial of service attacks.)

[Jim Kirkpatrick]

Chris Schwarz wrote about it over on Popular Woodworking:

As some of you might know,
The Wood Whisperer.com
(Marc Spagnuolo and family) has been besieged by a
DDoS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS#Distributed_attack)
attack this week. In fact, as I write this, I can’t even get onto his site.As a survivor of Internet malice – remember whehttp://lostartpress.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/whisperer2.jpg?w=216 (http://lostartpress.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/whisperer2.jpg)n the pornographers took over the Woodworking Magazine site for three long days? – I know these attacks are expensive, time-consuming and personally all-consuming.I cannot think of any other Internet woodworker who has been more generous with his time, advice and technical expertise. He has personally lent a hand to many bloggers to help them tidy up their sites and get them running smoothly. And he has built perhaps the biggest and most cohesive woodworking community on the Internet.And now he really needs our help. Consider joining his Guild, buy a shirt(thank Shiva the “May the Schwarz be With You” shirts are long gone), or do what I did: Send the dude some cash via a PayPal donation. I sent $100, which is a drop in the bucket. But put together enough drops and my basement is leaking again.
— Christopher Schwarz