From the day following upgrade to the new forum software, 15th Sept until the 19th, we were 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.  This was followed up a couple of days later with a further attack that left more data to sift through, which we have passed on to our IT forensics people.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.    We don't believe that this is a random attack on balance, but for 5 days and a further evening 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.