More hacktivism against blogs

Is no one safe?  It appears that hacktivists are exercising their ire against bloggers now. Good luck to them. There are a lot more bloggers than extremist hackers.  From the article:

"Australian Darren Rowse confirmed that an outage Monday on his ProBlogger weblog was caused by a DDoS.."

and

"An earlier series of attacks targeted theblog of MichelleMalkin, who led a movement among bloggers to mirror the controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad that initially appeared in a Danish magazine."

Everyone who values their publishing platform should start to investigate defenses now rather than after becoming a victim. Things you can do:

1. Host on a robust platform with up to date patches.

2. Have redundant load balanced servers.

3. Negotiate higher burstable bandwidth from your ISP/hosting provider. 

4. Invest in DDoS defenses. TopLayer and Arbor Networks are two possibilities. Prolexic offers a managed service.

5. Use a web application firewall.  

Just don't be surprised when your web operations are disrupted by fanatics or crooks.