Vandalism strikes everywhere

My local parish council (Sandridge Parish, St. Albans) have decided to support renewable energy initiatives and publicise the concept by installing and using solar roof panels on one of our (Jersey Farm) community centres.  A laudable idea, but the day the installation was due to finish some fine member of our community put a brick through one of the panels, so now there is a wrangle over insurance and repairs, and the extra expense of installing polycarbonate sheeting for protection.

On my last post I mentioned the Million Dollar Home Page, but wondered why the link didn't seem to work.  I discover that poor Alex Tew's well publicised site is under intense DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack.  I don't know what that is, but it is enough to bring the site down, as measures to prevent that aren't part of Alex's service package with his ISP InfoRelay.  The article I read suggested:

The attacks are coming from computers worldwide, including the U.S., Europe and Asia, Weiss said. The attacks could be the work of a botnet - a network of computers illegally commandeered for sending spam and DDoS attacks.

It sounds like InfoRelay are trying to help (they'd have a PR disaster if they didn't!), and doing more than they've been paid for:

InfoRelay has been in contact with law enforcement about the attacks, and has worked with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation before, Weiss said. "We don't like to see this," he said. "It is illegal."

Don't you think this is appalling?  Whether it is the brick flung by some disaffected youth, or these cyber vandals, spammers and virus creators, it means that we all pay for it in the extra protections we have to fund, or the extra work it generates for our companies and governments in the clean up.  It's the reason why my company has to pay for a team sitting in The Hague monitoring our systems 24/7 for potential hacking attempts like this.  Entirely necessary, but such a waste of the world's resources, not to mention the creative energy that goes in to these things that could be doing some good.

Technorati Tags : hackers, milliondollarhomepage, DDoS, InfoRelay

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