“Slashdot.org, the “news for nerds” Web site popular among Linux
fans, fell victim to a series of hacker attacks for three days last
week. The site was taken down intermittently by a series of
distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks Thursday, Friday and
Saturday, Slashdot founder Rob Malda said today. The attacks were
similar to those that crippled Yahoo, eBay, E*Trade, Amazon.com,
the FBI and other sites in February.”
“The attacks were part of a triple witching at Slashdot. On
top of the attacks, Slashdot had just moved to a new server, and
the company was dealing with a Microsoft request to remove some
postings by Slashdot readers that the software giant said violated
its copyright.”
“The attacker or attackers timed the assault well, choosing a
moment when Slashdot was vulnerable, he added. Because of the
extremely high traffic and the move to new hardware and software,
administrators had to double-check that there wasn’t something
wrong with their own systems. “It took us a few hours until we were
positive we were under attack,” Malda said.”