DDoS, Negative SEO, etc.

This has been an interesting week for myself and Virante. First, some of you may know that Virante runs two free anti-spam services – OpenCaptcha (a free, distributed CAPTCHA system) and LinkSleeve (a free, distributed link spam detection API). This Monday, we were hit with what appears to have been a poorly orchestrated DDoS. I say poorly orchestrated because we were able to effectively control the attack within about 8 hours. Distributed Denial of Service attacks use a large number of computers to flood a server or website with so many requests that the site can no longer function. However, their attacks were not strong enough to prevent us from still being able to access the server via SSH (ie: the attack crippled Apache/MySQL but not our bandwidth nor...