The Malaysian Insider is now dead.
The last person who shut down The Malaysian Insider portal, has a secret message embedded in the page source of the front page.
Full message from likely the, “server guy”, Yusseri Yusoff, below:
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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 ([email protected])
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Goodbye TMI, you will be missed.
