Music Webmaster Len Mullenger: Len@musicweb.force9.co.uk

Is this Website under attack?

Sunday March 12th 2000

On the 26th of February this web site came under some sort of hostile attack. For five days a computer in Washington DC, IP number 38.203.184.172, was used to log onto this site for up to 17 hours a day during which viewed pages were constantly refreshed. I presume this was not a person sitting there but some sort of robot programme. The consequence of this was that anything up to 240Megabytes of bandwidth was being used each day. This is way outside the limits permitted by my ISP and slowed down the site for normal visitors. Some reported not being able to get linked pages to pull up at all,  for others access denied notices appeared. In those five days nearly 700 Mbytes of band width was used.

And then it stopped.

On March 7th it started again. This time two machines were being used simultaneously 38 203 184 172 and 38 203 184 173. At the time of writing the attacks stopped on March 24th. The consequence of this, if continued would be an escalation of charges by my ISP and ultimately the termination of the account with the loss of Music on the Web.

However it might not be personal at all. Recently Yahoo, Excite, ebay, Amazon, AOL and many other sites went "off the air" due to such attacks. It is thought that many thousands of other sites have been affected including my own it would seem. The FBI are investigating and have a number of American and German suspects.

These activities have slowed the internet by 25%.

You can read more about this on the Internet Magazine website. This is currently on their front page but if you are late reading this you may have to search their archives.

Len Mullenger

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