By Susan Duclos - All News PipeLine
By now many know that over the last few weeks the Drudge Report suffered massive
DDoS
attacks, the first knocking the popular news aggregation site offline
for about an hour-and-a-half, the second time it was unavailable
periodically during about an hour time frame. What many did not
catch because it only lasted for minutes, was on January 15, 2017, we
started seeing chatter about the Drudge Report showing a cached version
of it's page with news from 10 days previously, from January 5, 2017.
Stefan
Stanford grabbed a screen shot, where the date the screen shot was
taken is shown in the lower right corner in the image below: (The image
was too large to fit on page in its original size, so click image (
or here)
to enlarge so you can see the time stamp in the lower right corner of
when the image was taken. It will open in a new tab or window.)
A look through Drudge's archived pages shows that was what his paged looked like on January 5, 2017.
Archives here, date and time of that
original page here, as seen in the URL itself when you click the link.
Just
one day later, on January 16, 2017, we reloaded Steve Quayle's site to
see if he had posted anything new, and the date listed on his site, as
well as the articles he linked to were from 1/12/16, showing a page that
was four days old rather than his current page. As with the Drudge
Report incident, the cached version of the site only last for minutes,
then the updated live version was available again.
In the screen
shot below, I opened the image I took, along with the properties, to
show that the file was created on 1/16/2017, yet his page date on top is
1/12/17. (For an enlarged image,
click here or the image itself.)
Many services offer a way to keep a site online, even if the original server goes offline, such as "
Always Online,"
from Cloudfare, which "is a feature that caches a static version of
your pages in case your server goes offline," according to their
website. Or the Google Cached Page service where "Google crawls the web
and takes snapshots of each page as a backup just in case the current
page is not available," according to
Cached View.
