We may receive a commission when you use our affiliate links. However, this does not impact our recommendations.
As some of you might know, The Wood Whisperer.com (Marc Spagnuolo and family) has been besieged by a DDoS attack this week. In fact, as I write this, I can’t even get onto his site.
As a survivor of Internet malice – remember whe
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
Here are some supplies and tools we find essential in our everyday work around the shop. We may receive a commission from sales referred by our links; however, we have carefully selected these products for their usefulness and quality.
Anyone who lives in the real world understands that advertising helps pay the bills. I think the WoodWisperer website is one of the top 5 sites I have seen.
Thanks for the link to the interview Marc, great interview Chris, good to see the site back up and running
The comment about the banner ads is really annoying. The guy is trying somehow to eek out a living while at the same time giving all kinds of help and instruction to others. Thanks Marc for all the great help. Send me a PM with email, I’ll take Chris’s suggestion and send a donation. JV
I know when our woodworking site was hacked it took weeks to repair the damage and we had to change software to a different type. the wood whisper site has been a great resource and has done a ton of stuff for free or out of his own pocket and free to the public. as we do on our site every thing we do is for the good of the woodworking community at large. to be hacked is a low moment and it will be hard to recover from. this makes you wonder who is next will it be lumberjocks or will it be our site again now that we are giving the historic deltagrams away. this kind gesture is bound to have a negative return or a hack will come. this crime makes less since than graffiti I am with Chris the financial hit may be too much for them to take with out some help i know it set us back thousands of dollars which took services away from our readers good luck to the wood whisperer ill give what i can please do the same
I once took a computer course with a professor who also did security work for the US Govt. He showed the class a study he did where he interviewed several “hackers” trying to find out their reasoning. Turns out that nearly all of them were immature, malicious wackos. His words.
It’s probably because of all the spam he posts on his site. The guy is shameless about posting banner ads and commercials on his videos.
I wonder if Andre Roubo ever foresaw this….
As far as I’m aware this is the second time Marc has been targeted, I tried to listen to Chris’ interview a couple of weeks ago, unsuccessfully and Marc had put a post on the forum to say his sites had been attacked.
Hopefully the woodworking community can help Marc in whatever way they can, the “hackers” should be ashamed to have targeted someone who does so much to help others.
I can’t find a way to contact Marc directly, so I’m leaving it here. He should start rattling chains up the line with his hosting provider. They may not have the capacity to mitigate the attack, but their upstream providers probably do.
There are other options as well.
Verisign offers a DDoS mitigation service that I know from personal experience is very effective. I don’t know about pricing, but if they start mitigating the attack, the attack is done.
Amazon also offers hosting within their cloudspace. What looks like a devastating DDoS attack to most sites looks like a new book or movie release to Amazon.
Writing software to stop these kinds of attacks is what I do for my day job. Woodworking is just what I do on the side.