***scroll for update from Typepad/Six Apart***

Last week, cyberjihadists targeted Hosting Matters blogs twice in apparent retaliation for provocative photos posted by Hosting Matters blog Aaron’s CC. Over 100 blogs went down.

Aaron e-mails to tell me that he has been hacked again tonight (11:15pm EDT update – he’s back up). I captured the cyberjihadist’s graffiti:

The hacker’s moniker turns up a number of defacements on Google.

For the record: I do not approve of the cartoon Aaron posted that prompted the Saudi-based attacks, but every blogger in the ‘sphere worth their bandwidth should vigorously defend his freedom to criticize, ridicule, and challenge the jihadis. If we let a few anonymous Muslim computer thugs dictate what one blogger can say about Mohammed or Islam, who’s next?

I said last week that we are all affected by these attacks. If you haven’t been paying attention to this ongoing war, wake up. Help out those who are targeted. It’s not an isolated phenomenon, and it’s not going away.

***

In what may or may not be a related incident, Instapundit reports that both Typepad and LiveJournal are down.

A reader writes: “I know a couple of the livejournal tech folks, and they’re saying that it might be an issue with the new advertisement server setup. (livejournal now has ads).”

Aaron updates tonight:

I’m informed by Hosting Matters that I was not the primary target on Friday. Nonetheless, I will continue to cover this story, as it should be of primary concern to HM clients who are prominent in the blogosphere. The silver lining may be that during a time when it is not the day after another 9/11-like attack, the current attacks on HM may result in HM clients being more stable and reliable during a future attack…I’d like to find out who WAS the primary target at HM and think I’ve earned the right to know.

The good news is that my site is back up (I only lost the comments since the hack as I had the site backed up) and I’m working with third party security specialists to determine the source of the defacement. I’ll make sure to communicate findings to the WordPress and Hosting Matters communities as I learn more.

***

Update: The Squiggler, a Typepad blog, sends the following…

TypePad Service

Since approximately 4:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time, Six Apart has been the victim of a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack. This has affected all of Six Apart’s sites, causing intermittent and limited availability for TypePad, LiveJournal, TypeKey, sixapart.com, movabletype.org and movabletype.com. Our network operations staff is working around the clock with our Internet access providers to resolve the issue. We appreciate your patience and support, and will provide updates as we have them.

Updated 8:52 pm PDT

***

Previous:

Another cyberattack on blogs
Blogs down: hack attack
The Islamists’ war on the Internet
Jihad in cyberspace
Internet jihad continues