Hackers Cripple The Telegraph’s Website

Hackers attacked the website of The Telegraph, so users were unable to access it on Monday and Tuesday, May 21-22, 2007.

The attack started sometime at 9am on May 21, which was, however, set right by 11am when users like before could reach the site, telegraph.co.uk. But the site shut down again at 2pm. It is perceived that a distributed denial of service attack had hit the site leaving the IT engineers struggling to get the site up and running.

A denial of service attack on a particular website occurs when a large number of PCs are simultaneously led to access that site resulting in its break down due to congestion. In this type of an attack, computer users unknowingly become a part of it because a malicious e-mail or worm compromises their machines and builds the latter into a botnet network.

The attack occurred closely after the third week of May when Estonia blamed Russia in initiating a DoS attack to shut down its main websites and cripple its infrastructure. The attack, however, could not affect The Telegraph's blogs and the service of My Telegraph as they were on a different server.

The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks sent thousands of requests at the same time that inundated the server. Such attacks particularly target national newspapers when the latter publish unacceptable stories, said Paul Vlissidis, technical director at security specialists NCC Group. The Editors Weblog published Vlissidis' statement on May 22, 2007.

Newspaper sites frequently fall victim to attacks that have some political motive, said William Beer, director of security practice at Symantec. Times On Line published Beer's statement on May 22, 2007.

According to Paul Vlissidis, it is possible to prevent a DDoS attack by deploying a router that monitors inbound traffic to a website. Times On Line reported this, May 22, 2007.

In 2006, a report by Department of Trade and Industry revealed that 50% or more of business organizations experienced "a premeditated and malicious" attack on their security in the previous 12 months. Large businesses lost about 130,000 pounds as a result of such incident, the report said.

Related article: Hackers Redirect Windows Live Search to Malicious Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 6/1/2007