By John Leyden for The
Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
Unknown hackers bombarded the telegraph.co.uk with thousands of
spurious requests from around 9am yesterday morning. The site was
largely unavailable but returned to service at around 11am today
before dropping offline at 2pm and returning later this afternoon.
Such a pattern is not unusual for denial of service attacks as
hackers vary patterns of attack while defenders establish defences
designed to offload spurious traffic.
The paper blamed the attack, the most serious of a number it has
faced to date, on "vandalism". The website recently introduced a
redesign, adding a new blog section and news tool, My Telegraph.
Both services operated from a separate server and were therefore
not affected by the attack, New Media Age reports.
Cyber-attacks have been much in the news of late. Last week,
Russian and European leaders held a summit in the aftermath of a
three-week cycle of denial of service attacks targeting the Baltic
countries' internet infrastructure.
Estonian officials said they had traced back the IP addresses
involved in the attack to the address space of the Russian
government, prompting speculation that the attacks were officially
sanctioned, though the use by hackers of compromised Russian
government systems is another possibility.
© The Register
2007
