Gays.com Struck by Distributed Denial of Service Attack on Eve of International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia
Social network Gays.com today announced that it experienced a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that began at approximately 3.50am Hong Kong Time on May 15, 2009, causing the entire website to be inaccessible.
A distributed denial of service attack occurs when a multitude of systems attempt to flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system with illegitimate website requests. The flood of traffic by these requests cause the Internet bandwidth of the attacked site to be consumed to such an extent that the website is inaccessible to other legitimate users.
Said Kenneth Tan, spokesperson for Gays.com, “It is by no means a coincidence that this DDoS attack on Gays.com came today. We have been working for weeks on a high profile video campaign called ‘Take Up the IDAHO Challenge’ together with the Committee for the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. The final product of this campaign, a public awareness video, was going to be launched on the campaign site at http://gays.com/idaho on Sunday. This is a well-timed, well-orchestrated assault by a large botnet with tens of thousands of PCs sending requests to our site. Engineers with our Internet Service Provider remarked they have never seen an attack of this intensity before. We deplore these unscrupulous actions by an organised group to harrass, intimidate and silence us for what we are doing.”
Added Tan, “Our technical staff are now working round the clock to restore services to legitimate users. In the meanwhile, we are going through our access logs, gathering information through various mechanisms and connecting the dots to identify the origin of the attacks. We will be working with law enforcement officials to bring the cyberterrorists to justice.”
On May 17, 2009, the ‘Take Up the IDAHO Challenge’ video will be accessible at: http://www.youtube.com/user/gaysdotcom
For ongoing updates, please follow @gaysdotcom on Twitter.
