I’m happy to report that I can again log into the administrative page. I’ve released everything in the moderation queue and cleaned up a bit of a mess that I left while I was trying to figure out how to repush the posts that where already on the site but unreachable.
My hosting provider sent its customers an email explaining the situation and the actions that they took. It turns out that they were blocking connection attempts to the WordPress administrative page both to protect the accounts and also to lessen the stress on their servers. I suspected that they were filtering the logins to the admin page because I ran a packet trace on one of my attempt to log in and noticed that
- The initial TCP 3-way handshake completed in less that half a millisecond.
- Not a single GET request to the admin page was answered, even partially.
If the logins were failing because of too much traffic (a DOS attack, in effect), I would have expected to see the TCP handshake to show retransmissions and be slow. I would also have expected at least some of the GETs to succeed, if only partially.
In any event, the excitement is over for the time being although my hosting provider says that the attack is ongoing but that they have put less drastic measures in place. I want to take a moment to give my provider, IX Hosting, a shout out. They were very proactive in their reaction to this attack, first be recognizing there was a problem and then by blocking all access to the WordPress admin page when it became clear that the attacks were coming from thousands of IP addresses and that trying to block the attacking sites would not suffice.
When I first noticed the problem, I was able to engage a support tech on an IM chat immediately without having to open a support ticket or anything else. By and large things run smoothly with IX Hosting and when I do have issues, they are always dealt with in a timely, efficient, and friendly manner. If you’re looking for a reasonably priced home for your blog or other type of site, give them a look. I’ve been very happy with them.