The Deluxe server froze and had to be rebooted a few minutes ago. There were about 4 minutes of downtime while it rebooted. Everything is now back to normal. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Since last night was have been seeing a long series of brute force attacks on the Champion server. We have software that protects us against those, blocking IPs that make too many password attempts in a certain period of tim. But we are seeing an unprecidented number of attempts, more than 2000/hour at some times, from IPs all over the world.

So far, it has not had much of an impact on server performance, but it does appear to be a deliberate attack, on about a dozen unrelated websites on the server. Might be the result of a new virus, using zombie computers from various places, but we are not seeing anything in the security industry reports that matches this pattern. Some sources have talked about a “9/11 virus” but we see no real reports of anything like that.

We will continue to closely monitor the situation, and look for explanations from our security advisors.

We made some server changes over the weekend, that affect ONLY gryphynmedia.com itself, and there are some email delays. Email is being queued (saved on a back-up server), but response will be slowed today. The DNS changes have been slower to propagate than expected, but the lag should pass quickly.