Monday, May 15, 2006
Denial (part 1)
Last week saw 2 criminal attacks, the first against me personally, the second targeted at www.stopecg.org
In the first attack emails were faked to appear to have come from my online music business, the headers of the emails were also constructed so that bounced messages and replies would come to me. The Emails were set up to look like crude spam and even included a short list of records for sale. 'Hold on', I hear you ask, 'wouldn't this benefit the record shop?'
No, the intention was clearly to harm, the emails were sent exclusively to law firms, both unlikely clients for my product and a group more likely to take strong action when spammed. My suspicions were always that this was the action of one of the parties exposed on stopecg.org, a suspicion greatly reinforced when I discovered that a near identical attack was carried out against a businessman in Germany. Surprise! The German has also managed a website that exposes directory scams.
The second attack was an attempt to shut down www.stopecg.org, It was what is known as a Denial Of Service (DOS) attack,
This attack appears to have made use of 3rd party computers so called 'zombie' machines that had been hijacked by the attacker and instructed to bombard stopecg.org making it inaccessible to ordinary users. The effect was to force a temporary outage.
Both these attacks involved breaches of numerous laws, they were criminal activity, of course at this stage we cannot say for sure who perpetrated these crimes, investigations are underway.
I feel sure that some people reading this weblog will know exactly who is behind the attacks, perhaps you do not approve of their methods and would like to see them punished for their crimes, there are ways you can do this.
In the first attack emails were faked to appear to have come from my online music business, the headers of the emails were also constructed so that bounced messages and replies would come to me. The Emails were set up to look like crude spam and even included a short list of records for sale. 'Hold on', I hear you ask, 'wouldn't this benefit the record shop?'
No, the intention was clearly to harm, the emails were sent exclusively to law firms, both unlikely clients for my product and a group more likely to take strong action when spammed. My suspicions were always that this was the action of one of the parties exposed on stopecg.org, a suspicion greatly reinforced when I discovered that a near identical attack was carried out against a businessman in Germany. Surprise! The German has also managed a website that exposes directory scams.
The second attack was an attempt to shut down www.stopecg.org, It was what is known as a Denial Of Service (DOS) attack,
This attack appears to have made use of 3rd party computers so called 'zombie' machines that had been hijacked by the attacker and instructed to bombard stopecg.org making it inaccessible to ordinary users. The effect was to force a temporary outage.
Both these attacks involved breaches of numerous laws, they were criminal activity, of course at this stage we cannot say for sure who perpetrated these crimes, investigations are underway.
I feel sure that some people reading this weblog will know exactly who is behind the attacks, perhaps you do not approve of their methods and would like to see them punished for their crimes, there are ways you can do this.
- Simply report them to your local police, this can usually be done anonymously, or you could just put a dossier of evidence in the post and reference this page so the police know what they are investigating.
- Pass information to me, any information you have may help, but please remember that the more hard and verifiable facts you provide the more likely it is that a prosecution will follow. Emails will be treated in the strictest confidence. If you would prefer not to send an email you can post anonymously to a forum of your choice, anywhere on the www, as long as you include the word denialecg in your post (this word is currently not used anywhere on the internet so if you post it we will find your post as soon as it is referenced by Google). Please consider using an anonymous forum where we can reply and have a dialogue.
IMPORTANT: Please include all the information you have, little details such as networks used, the exact timing of the attacks and the wording used in the fake emails will help us to verify your report and may also give us leads.
Jules Woodell - 15th May 2006
