Hack Attack Shuts Down Online Auction Site By Frances Ann Burns TUJUNGA, Calif. Copyright 2000 APB Online, Inc. A California-based online auction site has offered a $25,000 reward for information on the perpetrators of an apparent hacker attack that put the site out of business for hours. George Tannous, founder and chief executive officer of BidBay.com, said the attack occurred at a bad time, when thousands of new registered users were being welcomed. He described the attacks as sporadic and said they halted after BidBay technicians took down two servers, deleted and reinstalled software and created a firewall. "They were pretty serious for two days, serious enough to have the FBI involved," Tannous said. Messages from Bulgaria Last Thursday, BidBay's servers were overwhelmed by millions of messages apparently coming from an Internet service provider in Bulgaria, Tannous said. On Friday, the attacks apparently came from Austria. But the perpetrator could be anywhere in the world. Denial of service attacks generally do not destroy files or allow hackers to get confidential information from Web sites. They simply flood the site with packets of information, usually coming from remote computers the hackers have been able to take over. Several months ago, BidBay's much-larger rival, eBay, and several other Web sites, including Amazon.com and Yahoo!, were shut down by a massive denial of service attack. A Canadian teenager has been charged with engineering the service interruption. Tannous said that BidBay's system was overwhelmed by enough random bits of information to keep two lines busy. The attack went through the Web site's Internet service provider, West Coast Internet, and Tannous was unsure if any other customers were affected. BidBay has been operating since January, billing itself as an alternative to eBay, the company that pioneered online auctions. Tannous says he bought the rights to his company's domain name for $1,000 on eBay. Frances Ann Burns is an APBnews.com staff writer. --- Sponsor's Message -------------------------------------- Get email and like it! Upgrade your brain with informative newsletters from IDG. From hot products to high-speed LANs, Linux to Novell, we’ve got the email you want--FREE at Topica! http://click.topica.com/aaaaBHb1dhr0b1uN1Ic/PCWorld ------------------------------------------------------------ to unsubscribe send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] to subscribe send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] more good stuff at http://theMezz.com/alerts ___________________________________________________________ T O P I C A The Email You Want. http://www.topica.com/t/16 Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Your Favorite Topics
