On Sunday (27 November 2016) a small website that I advise on was the victim of a DDoS attack that managed to knock the site offline. I received notice on Monday that the website was not working. I was able to ssh to the web server and quickly found that the database service was stopped. After a brief examination of the database logs (nothing too out of the ordinary), I started the service back up and sure enough the website came back online. As the website runs on Drupal, I logged in to take a peak at the Recent log messages and found hundreds of records of log in attempts from a lot of different IP addresses. User accounts on the website are only used by administrators to update content, so it was clear that the site was hit by a DDoS attack!

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Jumping back in to Python has been just as fun as my first experiences with it. After brushing off some of the dust, I have managed to put together a (very) small package that does a couple of basic things with a Google Takeout Mail (mbox) file:

1. Parses and standardizes the format of email addresses;
2. Imports key messages data in to an sqlite database;
3. Produces simple graphs of top recipients and senders.

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