When hackers attack! July 12, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
I was sort of amused, but not surprised, to see the report in the Irish Times about a “Suspected hacker attack on Eircom internet service”. What raised the suspicions about the involvement of hackers?
Some customers who tried to connect to popular sites such as RTÉ, Facebook or Bebo were redirected to incorrect websites, often displaying images of advertising or scantily clad women.
Scantily clad women… a hacker attack? Y’think? I guess that would be a clue.
But as it happened some of you will have noticed that on Monday and Tuesday of last week the eircom servers weren’t accessible or that if they were they were crawling.
The company blamed the problems on “an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic” directed at its website, which affected the systems and servers that provide access to the internet for its customers.
Internet discussion groups speculated that the problems were caused by a hacker accessing Eircom’s domain name server (DNS) system through a denial-of-service attack.
This involves a target site being saturated with messages and requests to the point it can no longer function properly.
It’s not hugely more useful, but I tend to use OpenDNS, a US based company which offers it’s own DNS settings that, on balance, are a little less prone to such issues as eircoms. But it’s horses for courses. That said some people were still having troubles yesterday which may suggest more localised issues in their case.
He [an eircom spokesperson] also rejected claims that the company had failed to inform customers, saying a notice was put up on the website yesterday.
Hmmm… I think I see a basic flaw in that plan…
that wasn’t so much of problem as the errors were intermittent but the problem was occurring for 3 days before they put up that statement
Yeah, I guess that’s true. Problematic enough though.
Denial of service attacks are simplistic and could only prevent a site coming up, there is no way a DOS attack could technically have redirected people to other website containing scantily clad women as suggested.
Someone is telling lies.
Same thing was up tonight – my eircom service went all Eoghan Harris there on me again this evening, so I’ve taken your advice and switched to opendns.
I hope it’s working for you Conor. It won’t deal with everything and you may find you need to refresh when using wiki and google on occasion, but, in general the service is snappy and not prone to fallling over…
Conor
I’m being a bit dense:
..my eircom service went all Eoghan Harris there on me..
Is that some rhyming slang or just a synonym for raiméis?
hehe. It’s not cockles and pears or nonsense as such. Much more simple. It went nuts.