Telegraph web site hit by hackers

On 21 May 2007 the Media Guardian reported the Telegraph Group web site had been wiped out for most of the day by hackers.

The attack was identified as a distributed denial of service attack, DoS. This is a malicious attack where thousands of multiple requests are sent to a site’s servers at once, causing it to crash.

Paul Vlissidis, Technical Director at NCC Group was quoted saying ‘National newspapers are particularly high-profile targets, particularly if they publish a story that someone doesn’t like. Most sites are geared up to deal with high traffic but not simultaneous traffic.’

According to a report by the Department of Trade and Industry as many as 14% of major UK businesses are thought to have been the subject of DoS attacks.

Vlissidis highlighted that hackers use secretive websites and private messaging networks to sell their services as ‘hackers for hire’ – including offering to organise DoS attacks on sites.