Hey Friends:
You may have noticed some really slow response from the Selene Owners' website. Club Express is experiencing a Denial of Service attack. For those of you not familiar with this term, it means that a bad actor has managed--usually through planting malicious code on thousands of computers--to send an overwhelming number of requests to the Club Express servers so that they just get bogged down with an unreasonable level of traffic.
In order to accomplish this, the perpetrators will distribute malicious software through bad links, infected downloads, etc.. In many cases, this malicious software doesn't really do anything to your computer. You probably aren't aware of it's presence even when it's doing it's "thing". At some point, the perpetrators activate the software on thousands of computers to send requests to the servers they are trying to attack.
This type of attack can be difficult to stop because it's distributed across thousands of computers all over the world and the hackers usually attempt to make the requests that their malicious software makes look like valid requests so it's difficult for the server to know which ones to ignore and which ones are real user requests.
They've been working on this for several days now and are keeping the site admins (myself) appraised of their progress.
I should have sent this note out a couple of days ago, but at one point, it looked like they had solved the problem.
By the way, these DoS (Denial of Service) attacks don't mean that any data is compromised or the servers have been hacked. It just means that some hackers are sending a far higher-than-normal volume of requests at the servers with the intent of slowing them down or even causing them to crash.
Mark Tilden
Selene Owners Association Webmaster