30th March 2011
Failed denial of service attempt
We are aware that a denial of service attack on our systems has been inaccurately reported in the press.
The report dated March 24th, credited to Eric W. Dolan, appears (amongst other places) on a site called the Raw Story and claims that ‘The decentralized community of hacktivists known as “Anonymous” knocked the website of the UK Copyright Service offline on Thursday’.
Our site was not in fact ‘knocked offline’ by the attack, and we have not been contacted by Mr Dolan to verify any of the details in his report.
The facts
Our Internet facing web-servers were targeted on both Monday 14th and Friday 25th of March in what appears to have been prolonged distributed denial of service attacks. We did see increased traffic on our network on both those dates. The attacks did not take down our site. Our firewalls and routers were able to filter out virtually all of the traffic and our site continued to operate normally throughout the attacks.
Comment
We are very surprised to have been targeted by the Anonymous group in this way: Our service was set up by creative individuals to support creative individuals. Most of our clients are individuals and smaller companies who are simply trying to secure evidence to help defend their rights if they are victim to illegal exploitation of their work – hardly the corporate faceless giants that activist groups tend to target.
The observant reader may also have noticed an inconsistency in the dates: The last increase in network traffic happened on Friday 25th of March, but the report is dated Thursday 24th (the day before) - we leave you to draw your own conclusions from that.