[Warning : English is not my native language (French and German are)...]
I just learned that the french server where my Skarlet domain name and subdomains are hosted (Gandi) encounters the second denial-of-service attack in 24 hours! That means : "1 094 433 hosted domains" (and corresponding subdomains) are completely out of order at the present time (since last night)...
Another attack really did exasperate me a few weeks ago (mid-october 2010) : The one on Kenneth Goldsmith's UbuWeb You might have read Goldsmith's Open Letter after the hack. He explains this point: "Ubu doesn't touch money. We don't make a cent. We don't accept grants or donations. Nor do we -- or shall we ever -- sell anything on the site. No one makes a salary here and the work is all done voluntarily (more love hours than can ever be repaid). Our bandwidth and server space is donated by universities..." So, if Gandi is a commercial enterprise (may be a little cooler than others), why attack sites like Ubu entirely devoted to the promotion of modern and contemporary art and thinking? The eternal question is: Who would do such a thing? In his Letter, Kenneth Goldsmith puts it straight: "Ubu presents orphaned and out-of-print works. Sometimes we had inadvertently host works that are in print and commercially available for a reasonable price. While this is strictly against our policy, it happens. (...) Then someone tells us that we're doing it and we take it down immediately and apologize. Ouch. The last thing Ubu wants to do is to harm those who are trying to legitimately sell works." So, I ask again: Who has an interest to hack "alternative" Websites like Ubu? The Gandi hack might have been performed by a rival, or a client convinced that he had been "screwed", or by Hacko the Wacko... But what about Ubu? I really don't want to bring up 9/11 again (since I did so yesterday), but there is a patent similarity between terrorist and Internet attacks: If nobody claims to be the author, it seems to be rather difficult to track him down. - Above all, like the French say "A qui profite le crime?" (no, not "cherchez la femme"!) - What would be the mobile in the Ubu case? Frankly, I'm still looking for an answer...
Well, Gandi (& Skarlet) are online again (after ~ 15 hours offline). It's a relatively small Parisian company. I imagine the big shots calling a thousand times since past midnight because their clients can't access their commercial servers. But, anyway, the technicians seem to be quite quick (2 hacks cleaned up in less than 24 hours). If it had occasioned a longer interruption of the service, the "profit" of this repeated attacks (but may be the story is not yet over?) seems to be clear: The commercials would have looked for an another hoster...
But one last word on UbuWeb: Two or three reasons could explain the hack (3 weeks or so offline). The first one is clealy commercial: Ubu is bad for business, since it demonstrates that Art can be freely accessed. Ubu promotes with other projects (Internet Archive, Sourceforge...) the Idea of a Free Web ("alternative", "Open Source", "Creative Commons"...)... and that is not only bad for business, it's also a political matter: That could be another reason for the attack... Last but not least, you can always imagine an autistic and very intelligent person sitting in front of his screen night and day, hacking hell for leather: May I introduce, they call him Hacko the Wacko and his partner is The Slime ("oozin' out from your TV set", FZ), commanding an army of Zombies...
Well, there might be a cybernetic war going on... in France we now have the "Hadopi-Police" chasing every illegal downloading. Merci, Sarkozy...