Monday, May 28, 2012 is Memorial Day in the United States, the day set aside to honor our war dead. We are deeply indebted to them, and recognize their sacrifice. To the families of those who have fallen in combat, you are in our prayers. Personally, I have also been spending some time in prayer in remembrance of the sacrifices of our allied soldiers.
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This past weekend, our server in Sweden was put under a “ping flood [1]” Denial of Service (DOS) attack [2] that at times resulted in 65% packet loss.
The attack was timed for a three-day holiday weekend, no doubt because the miscreants expected that the staff at our ISP would be unavailable to help us reconfigure.
OBTW, the attack initially did not include our dotted quad backup address: 95.143.193.148 (Which is explained here.)
At least this provided a good test for our Continuity of Web Services (COWS [3]) defenses. Obviously, we are now going to need multiple mirror sites as well as an adaptive cloud server that can handle any future DOS onslaught.
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Today we present an article by our Medical Editor, Dr. Cynthia Koelker as well as another gear test and evaluation review by our Field Gear Editor, Pat Cascio.