By Thor Olavsrud, InternetNews.com
Attrition.org, which has long
kept track of Web site defacement activity, announced Monday that
it will no longer maintain mirrors of defaced sites.
Attrition, in the words of its staff members, “is a non-profit
hobby site run by a handful of volunteers in their free time.”
While it may be a volunteer effort, the result has become a primary
destination for security professionals and journalists seeking
information about the latest hacker attacks.
But those attacks have been steadily increasing in scope.
“What began as a small collection of Web site defacement mirrors
soon turned into a near 24/7 chore of keeping it up to date,”
Attrition said. “In the last month, we have experienced single days
of mirroring over 100 defaced Web sites, over three times the total
for 1995 and 1996 combined. With the rapid increase in Web
defacement activity, there are times when it requires one of us to
take mirrors for four or five hours straight to catch up.”
On top of that, volunteers have struggled to maintain other
parts of the site, turning the “hobby” into a harrying second
job.
“In essence, what was once a hobby site run in spare time for
fun has turned into a beleaguering second job,” Attrition said. “A
job that comes with more headache, complaints, criticisms, slander
and attacks than productive output or reward. In two years we have
turned away countless computer security work that could have been
fulfilled by a number of us. The abuse and ignorance we deal with
from defacers and defacement victims is staggering, and some of
that abuse spills over into actual attacks. Attrition has been
taken down more than once by massive denial of service attacks
which have inconvenienced our generous upstream provider, hundreds
of other colo customers, and thousands of dialup customers, making
our job even more difficult.”
That is not to say that Attrition is going away. The mirrors
will no longer be maintained, but other sections will remain and
will have more attention and resources thrown their way. Attrition
will continue to perform statistical analysis of defacements
utilizing the Alldas mirror, and will continue to provide
commentary and articles on high profile defacements, significant
trends and other activity that “warrants attention.”
The volunteers plan to bring back and revamp the errata section,
and also plan to pay more attention to the image gallery, music
reviews, movie reviews, poetry, contests and ‘Going Postal’
areas.