The Malaysian Insider
From Misc Data Digs
Hidden Message[edit | edit source]
When the site shut down on March 15, 2016, the site was replaced with a picture of all of the people who worked for the website as a farewell. However, there was also a hidden message from one of its staff members in that page's code.
I suppose I never thought I'd be the one to turn off the lights at The Malaysian Insider. But there you have it, it is me. It's been a good ride. One of my best memories was in February 2012. It was a normal Friday, nothing special. Then the site went down. I was having a chit chat with some friends over at Celcom. So, I rushed over to AIMS, to find out what the hell happened. The AIMS guys said their switch went down and we were not the only ones affected. I thought to myself, "Man, these AIMS guys should get better switches, then." After rebooting the switch(es), they immediately zonked out again. Then, one of the AIMS guys came up to me and said, "The Malaysian Insider is under a DDOS attack." I said, "But our servers are still up, dude. Your switches are down." The guy replied, "Because the volume of attack is so high, our switches were not able to handle it. So, you need to do something to stop this." What the fuck could I do? After some flapping about, the AIMS guy said that they've got a sister company that provides DDOS protection upstream from us. And after some very quick negotiations between them and TMI's big cheeses, and some superb rewiring effort from AIMS, we were under DDOS protection and back up and running. Some 9 hours after we went down. 8 of those hours I was in the data centre. No food, no drink and I had quit smoking. The snack plate at the KFC after that was some of the best fried chicken I have ever had. After that we were hardly bothered by a DDOS attack ... until April 2013, a month before the 13th General Elections. It was a committed, sustained attack that lasted for most of the month of April. Towards the end of the month, I had a chat with Jahabar. I said to him, "These fucks are really persistent. We've been under attack for almost a month now. I think they must be paid on a success basis or something." Jahabar agreed. The attackers were really persistent. We then both also agreed that AIMS and its sister company, Global Transit Communications (GTC) were doing a superb job in countering the attacks. And that's when I got a call from Farid, of GTC... It was not good news. But that's a different story. For another time. Jahabar Sadiq ran The Malaysian Insider. And I helped, a little bit. I'll miss you, TMI. Thank you for reading this, whoever you are. -- Yusseri Yusoff (REMOVED)