Since the 15th Sept until until yesterday afternoon (19th), we have been under a concerted attack by a person or persons using a number of 'bots and other people's Proxy networks to carry out what is called a Distributed Denial of Service attack, which is a method by which these 'bots submit thousands of requests to the website per second to overload the server and bring the site to its knees.  While this was going on, they were also making Brute Force attacks on our remote communications port to try and breach the server so they could do anything from format the hard drives to change ownership of the site, and bombarding the mailserver with similar bogus requests, some of which left some rather telling details behind.   We fought this with the tools available to us, and have gathering a substantial amount of evidence against the attackers, who persisted with their attack for almost 5 days regardless of the consequences to themselves.  This was a terrible mistake on their part.  On the advice of our Lawyer and fellow member JohnT, we yesterday informed the National Crime Agency and requested their assistance with the matter, and in an ongoing dialogue with them to find the culprits, so we are allowing them access to the server and its logs.  Hackers are seldom able to completely mask their real identity and location, and we have some very competent people working on it on our behalf, which is already reaping the rewards.   We don't believe that this is a random attack on balance, but for 5 days we had to put up with some disturbance and interruption to the usually fast response of the website as we are seeing now that the attack has ended.  We will prevail, and don't worry about it.  We were the target, and these people will not win.  Karma will catch up with them   Mike, Greg, Dave & Julien.