Sep 21, 2018

Recent Update as of 6:01 AM, 9-22-2018: The cache issue with the Daily Weblogs list (showing the most recent blog posts) seems to have been taken care of. For anyone that was having issues with this page, such as the incorrect blog posts being shown as the most recent ones, we recommend you revisit the page by clicking "Daily WebLogs" in the Header Nav, rather than simply refreshing the page you're on. We are still looking into some other issues, but the main issue being caused by the cache was in the Daily WebLogs page, which now seems to have been fixed. This is still related to the initial attack from two days ago; we just need to do a lot of inspection to make sure that we actually have full recovery.

Update as of 12:58 AM, 9-22-2018: We are still running into several issues, specifically with caching, which is causing pages to not show the most updated data, such as the Daily List. This is causing other internal issues in the CMS as well. We are looking into this, and will update once we have further progress. Please bear with us during this time.

Original Post

Over the past couple days, you may have noticed that the site was running incredibly slow, sometimes not even connecting at all. After looking into this, we discovered that the cause was an excess amount of bots hitting the site. We don't know particularly what these bots were, or what they're purpose was, but it was eating up all the bandwidth that could otherwise be used by legitimate visitors, and it looked like a DDOS attack. Yesterday, a firewall was put on the website to automatically detect this kind of bot traffic, and mitigate against it in the future.

Along with this, we have completed all the updates to the core of Concrete5 (the CMS that we use for GKM), and to all add-ons we are using. In other words, these updates will help keep the site more secure, and running more efficiently. These updates that have been completed on the existing site are not relating to the new site; we are still in the process of developing the new site for GKM, which will allow us to add a ton of functionality that we have been wanting to add to GKM for a long time.

You should notice a marked speed improvement on the site. This includes both on a computer, and on a smartphone. We are still addressing some issues  that are occurring, and fine tuning some things, so if you see something wrong, or there's an error occurring for you, please let us know on the support desk at https://gkmsupport.freshdesk.com and we'll help out however we can.

Thank you all for bearing with us during this process, it's always our desire to make the GKM website more user-friendly, and as fast and secure as possible for our viewers!

Blessings!
- GKM Admin