Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 10:03:05 -0700
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Alert: Hacker attack?
Caution: the foregoing is unconfirmed and should be treated as speculation
at this point.
This morning (PDT) the www.latimes.com discovered that people were not
able to access the site or were experiencing a severe degradation in
service. Investigation by our technical staff seems to point to some sort of
hacker attack on our host, BBN. Evidence seems to point to a bunch of TCP/IP
connections to our server there being left open and multiplying
simultaneously, never timing out, according to one of our systems people. I
don't understand the technical side of this, so please don't bombard me with
systems-oriented questions. I repeat that this is not yet confirmed
officially, and I'm only posting this information to put others on guard.
BBN is rebooting our server to try to clear the problem.
Has this happened to you?
--Jeff
We do know that somehow our server up at BBN needed to be rebooted this
morning, apparently because of this incident.
At 07:39 AM 10/24/96 -0700, Joe Shea wrote:
>
> On the LA Times site this morning, I was unable to get anything
>to work with a text browser. It has worked intermittently in the past.
>I wonder, too, if they got spoofed because one headline is in lower case
>where all the rest are capitals, and it's not in quotes: it sounds like
>it's calling the Times a parasite. It may be the Mad Cow story, but I
>thought it must be a story some hacker stuck in there. Like the rest, it
>wouldn't open up.
>
> The LA Times is potentially a major competitor to the much more
>accessible NY Times, but it has made its content far less accessible than
>the Times content is. One achievement of the NYT site, which most of the
>contributors to this forum may not appreciate, is that it is so quick and
>easy to load and read via lynx. Not as quick and easy as AR :), of course,
>but really great.
>
>Best,
>
>Joe Shea
>Editor-in-Chief
>The American Reporter
>joeshea@netcom.com
>http://www.newshare.com:9999
>
>
>On Thu, 24 Oct 1996, 'Doc' Don Taylor wrote:
>
>> The LA Times has rejected an ad for Pac Bell's At Hand
>> web site. At Hand is a yellow-pages like site with 1.2
>> million merchant listings and its own editorial content.
>>
>> The Times and Pac Bell have a joint marketing
>> agreement where the Times promotes (and gets paid if a
>> reader signs up for) PacBell Net access. PacBell sends
>> people to the Times site for local news. But this ad
>> campaign was apparently considered too directly in
>> competition.
>>
>> Story at http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,4748,00.html
>>
>>
>> Doctor Don -- Internetist
>> ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
>> Specializing in the diagnosis, prevention and
>> treatment of Internet diseases and maladies.
>> docdon@pobox.com +1.757.877.4992
>> *** Member Virginia Peninsula Chamber of Commerce ***
>>
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