Last Monday I got a high-severity alert that the [email protected] email address was restricted from sending emails due to suspicious behavior. At first blush it appeared that someone had hacked the VDARE.com email system and was using the [email protected] email address to launch a DOS attack against a couple of targets, one of them being Letitia James’ email server at the Attorney General’s office. Thankfully, that turned out not to be the case—that is to say, our system was not penetrated as we initially feared. What happened, and what continues to happen even as I type this, is that a bot was trained to abuse our ebulletin sign-up from on the homepage. Each time someone signs up for the ebulletin, our system sends them a “please confirm your sign-up” email. The bot was/is using Letitia James’ email address to sign her up over and over again, several hundred thousand times and counting. Each fake sign-up triggers a system email, which clogs up our sent and outbox data files and presumably her inbox, assuming she hasn’t already blocked [email protected], which I’m sure she has.

Our tech team has, for now, dammed the flood, but it is far from resolved. The first dam they put up (an invisible captcha with a digital ”honeypot”) was sidestepped by the bot pretty easily, leading my techie to theorize that there is a real human behind it, adapting the code as we work to stop it. The second dam we have up now is holding, but it is unclear for how long.

For that reason, anyone attempting to sign up for our bulletins or reset their account passwords should instead CALL ME on the phone at 860-361-6231 or email me at [email protected] and I will do it manually. With the [email protected] email address incapacitated, those actions will not work for you without calling or emailing me.

Our Donation Page (vdare.com/donate) is unaffected, and any support you might give VDARE.com during this difficult time is greatly appreciated.