We apologize for the disruption of service. These are unprecedented times at SurveyGold, as we experienced yet another set of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks over this past weekend.
It was the fourth such attack in five days. In over 20 years of being in business, we have never endured such a sustained level of attack. When these attacks occur they flood our network with extraordinary levels of traffic, which brings our network traffic to a standstill, thus effectively crippling our services.
Often times these attacks are random and they come and go like an episode of bad weather. In this particular episode, the attacker is an unknown but intentional person who has expressed malicious intent against our SurveyGold domain and many others that are hosted by our internet hosting provider.
The heinous attacker has circumvented each mitigation we have introduced... until now. As of late last night we have physically moved our servers and introduced a sophisticated solution which employs technology specifically designed to detect and deflect such attacks.
New internet address for surveygold.com: 38.89.141.118
If you work in an institutional setting where your access to the Internet is controlled by a corporate policy, we recommend that you provide this new internet address to your IT support staff so that they can add the new surveygold.com internet address to the whitelist of acceptable addresses.
It was the fourth such attack in five days. In over 20 years of being in business, we have never endured such a sustained level of attack. When these attacks occur they flood our network with extraordinary levels of traffic, which brings our network traffic to a standstill, thus effectively crippling our services.
Often times these attacks are random and they come and go like an episode of bad weather. In this particular episode, the attacker is an unknown but intentional person who has expressed malicious intent against our SurveyGold domain and many others that are hosted by our internet hosting provider.
The heinous attacker has circumvented each mitigation we have introduced... until now. As of late last night we have physically moved our servers and introduced a sophisticated solution which employs technology specifically designed to detect and deflect such attacks.
New internet address for surveygold.com: 38.89.141.118
If you work in an institutional setting where your access to the Internet is controlled by a corporate policy, we recommend that you provide this new internet address to your IT support staff so that they can add the new surveygold.com internet address to the whitelist of acceptable addresses.
How to Speed Up Your Restoration of Service
All SurveyGold online services are fully functional and available at this time. If you are still experiencing issues with being able to save an online survey or collect responses, this is a transient condition that will resolve itself today while our new server location is propagated to your computer through a process known as DNS propagation.
One thing that you can try to speed up the DNS propagation process is to clear the list of internet addresses (known as the DNS cache) that your Windows operating system maintains:
This “resets” the set of internet addresses maintained on your computer. This will not break anything on your computer. It just means that your computer will create and maintain a new list of internet addresses that it manages locally on your computer…as you visit websites with your browser (e.g., Chrome) and as applications like SurveyGold access the surveygold.com website for necessary online services.
One thing that you can try to speed up the DNS propagation process is to clear the list of internet addresses (known as the DNS cache) that your Windows operating system maintains:
- Launch Windows command prompt console as follows:
Press the Windows+R key combination in order to open the Run dialog box. Type the following command and click the OK button: cmd
(This opens the Windows command line prompt in a box, which provides a primitive way of interacting with the Windows operating system.) - Flush the DNS cache as follows:
On the command line that appears, type this command and press Enter: ipconfig /flushdns
(You can then click the X to close the command line box.)
This “resets” the set of internet addresses maintained on your computer. This will not break anything on your computer. It just means that your computer will create and maintain a new list of internet addresses that it manages locally on your computer…as you visit websites with your browser (e.g., Chrome) and as applications like SurveyGold access the surveygold.com website for necessary online services.
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