Boards.ie is perhaps Ireland’s longest standing and most successful online community, where you can find out anything from local mechanics to the best bargain alerts on the web, while also being the most in-depth bank of knowledge on the Atari Jaguar. Boards.ie is currently ranked 26th in Ireland and just over 7,000th in the global Alexa rankings. However, on Sunday evening, 17th January, the online forum has been under a DDOS attack, but just what exactly is a DDOS attack and why was Boards.ie targetted? Join us as we take a look.
What is a DoS and DDoS attack
Dos and DDoS are similar attacks that the online community fear being on the end of. DoS stands for a “denial of service”, which occurs when a system (like a website) is flooded with requests for information repeatedly. Basically, imagine you visiting a website and hitting refresh thousands of times per second. DDoS is very similar but the source is distributed across various computers and locations, hence it’s name “distributed denial of service”. Effectively, DoS and DDoS attacks symbolise a flooded car engine, being given too much of what it strives to run on where the fuel is replaced by pageviews.
While there are certain noble, for want of a better word, reasons for DoS and DDoS attacks, such as hacktivists Anonymous taking down sites of undesirables, these attacks are becoming more commonplace against corporate giants. PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, the list goes on and on as nearly every large company worldwide must fear being targeted.
Why was Boards.ie targetted for DDoS?
This is a practical unknown, but that’s not to say a few aren’t taking their chance to get some new users.
Any Boards.ie #LFC fans who need your fix during the boards downtime, pop over to https://t.co/4dRMXm2NMn and get your fix.
— Paul Larkin (@Irish_Kop) January 19, 2016
Put that tinfoil hat away, the DDoS is unlikely to be caused by someone looking to promote another site. It’s far more likely that this is someone trying to show what they are able to do and decided to target.
With that in mind, there are another community who would appear to be less than pleased with what now appears to be the “old timers” of online communities. There are plenty of Reddit users who are relishing the Boards DDoS attack and have used the outage to rant on Reddit; but is it possible that someone was so annoyed by the discussions that on they took the forum down?
So what do you think? Is Boards.ie stale and past its sell-by date or is it still one of the best place to get the latest news in Ireland?
