Server security was not compromised, only resources exhaustion.
Our website is fairly heavy and running on rather really old hardware (if it ain't broken, don't fix it!), so the fast pace of attempts to find an exploitable security vulnerable lead to heavy CPU and Disk usage, and after our automated backoffice routines kicked in schedule, these in combination caused resource exhaustion when swapping began.
We will be working to put in resource limitations to avoid this situation happening again, along with limiting maximum pageloads per client and ultimately a systems upgrade to have even higher margin for heavy resource consumption.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Friday, March 14, 2014
