My IP address keeps getting blocked.

[Xoosla]

Today is the second time (in so many months) that I have had my site brought down, apparently due to a brute force attempt made from my IP address.

While I appreciate that SG has to protect their servers and using a firewall to prevent brute force attacks is required, I do however have issues about not being told about it and finding out hours later because no one can be bothered to at least send out an email explaining the issue.

Again, while I appreciate that I am not the only one that uses SG and this may not be a priority to you, I am surprised that there is no automated email explaining at least my site is down. Any information that could be given would help in a long way to preventing this issue from happening again in the future.

As for this being a virus issue, I highly unlikely suspect that this would be the case or I would have has some indication from either my own firewall or anti-virus, even though this isn't 100% full proof I know.

I may however know the reason and this means that your firewall may actually need re-adjusting to to help prevent this from happening to others in the future.

I have been getting lot of spam mail recently and I decided to use Mailwasher again, I reinstalled the program, but I forgot that I had changed all my passwords recently. However, before I could change all the password settings in Mailwasher, I had to leave and I forgot to close the program.

When I came back home, I found that my site was down and Mailwasher was telling me that it could not connect due to incorrect username and password. I find it hard that your firewall would class this as a brute force attack, especially when Mailwasher checks for mail at 10 minute interval?

I seriously think you maybe could also rethink this 5 and you're out. Maybe you could take time into factor, for example if it happens 5 times every year or 6 months, because if I cannot find the problem and SG is not helping be debug this issue, I might be force to leave for someone else the way things are going.

I am generally happy with the service and I have had no other issues apart from this one and the uptime is excellent.

Thanks,

John Neill

[Anatoli]

Dear John Neill,

Thank you for the feedback. I don't think that there is a global issue though. As you have stated, Mailwasher had been trying to log in with incorrect details for hours. This would have caused any IDS / IPS to be activated including ours, of course.

I am sure that this issue will not happen again unless there are more suspicious login attempts. I wish you good luck with your site.