If you visit Rare Puzzles often, you surely noticed that the website has been down for maintenance for several days. We have gone through a brute-force attack.
When you visited the website on May 25th, you could only see a white blank screen. It is the White Screen of Death, and most webmasters are quite familiar with it. The software we use to build our marketplace has multiple components or plugins. Their interactions and updates sometimes cause glitches and malfunctions. No big deal. In most cases, we can identify and solve the problem easily.
We isolated the source of the problem and the website was up and running in a short time. However, one of our regular visitors (thank you, Elke) noticed something weird when browsing the site. Her virus protection program blocked what looked like a scam website that popped up while scrolling Rare Puzzles. Everything looked normal from our side and the initial test showed that the website was clean. However, we closed the site in order to investigate further.
That's when we detected that Rare Puzzles was being the target of a...