One of the Catches With Centralized Weblogging/Journaling

LiveJournal has been under a Distributed Denial of Service attack since yesterday afternoon. The latest is at status.livejournal.com, which presently reads:

At 3:57 am EST on Thursday, February 20th, Admin lisa writes :

LiveJournal is currently under a Distributed Denial of Service attack, and has been since about 5:30pm PST (1:30 AM GMT) tonight. We have been working with our upstream providers (including several major backbones) to filter traffic as quickly and effectively as possible.

Due to the fact that a DDOS attack involves potentially tens of thousands of hosts all working together against a single target (in this case, us), it is extremely difficult to find one group of IP addresses to block to prevent the attack from affecting our services any further. Our upstream providers are currently filtering somewhere around 1/4 of the IPs on the internet from reaching LiveJournal. Unfortunately, these filters also block legitimate traffic from some users. When the attack has subsided we will remove the filters.

We will continue to monitor and block hosts as we gather more information regarding this attack. We seriously apologize for the inconvenience, and hope you understand we are doing everything in our power to get the site back functioning as normal.

LiveJournal offers some nice, easy-to-use tools. Unfortunately, it presents a big target as well. It's still a little beyond me why someone would select LiveJournal in particular as a DDOS target. I know it's unlikely, but I hope they figure out who's responsible for the attack.