Hello [fname],

We wanted to bring to your attention that that your website(s) was/were intermittently down from 6 PM Tuesday, November 17th until 2 PM on Wednesday, November 18th due to DDoS attacks on the server that hosts your website(s).

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely.

If you would like to read more about Dos or DDoS attacks, here is a link to Wiki. You can also Google DoS or DDoS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

During the above DoS attack we saw over 100,000 hits accessing the server at any given time to flood and shut down the targeted domain. We have now shutdown and isolated the targeted domain to ensure all other domains on the server are not impacted if such were to happen again.

There were no outages to any other services including Emails or DNS. If you use web mail to check emails, you may have had difficulty logging in to web mail at the time of the problem, but there were no issues if you use Outlook. Please note that your website data and emails were not lost during this time.

This was the first time our server came under such an attack since the company was established in 2001. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused to our valuable clients like you. We are working with our service provides to prevent any such attack in the future.

We will keep on guaranteeing our 99.9% uptime availability.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

Thank you once again for your patience and understanding.

Your business is very much appreciated at iQWeb Solutions Inc.

Best Regards,

Aamir Iqbal, IT Manager
iQWeb Solutions Inc.