HomeChoice in DDOS blitz

Back to normal

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 5th January 2001 19:27 GMT

Free whitepaper – Dell/EMC CX4 and Dell PowerEdge blades

Broadband ISP and video-on-demand outfit HomeChoice has admitted it suffered a denial of service attack yesterday from hackers which disrupted its service to customers.

Details of what happened are still somewhat sketchy but a spokesman for HomeChoice said: "We had a denial of service attack, and this slowed the system down. We found these requests were coming from two subnets. We blocked these subnet addresses to overcome the problem."

"The problem is now resolved and we apologise for any inconvenience caused to customers, and we are contacting the systems administrators at the attack sources to inform them."

Despite being pressed on the subject HomeChoice is not commenting on the scale of the problem.

A Register reader who alerted us to the problem said he was told servers at all three of the firm's main sites, Staples Corner, Croyden and Grenwich, were "down due to a denial of service attack". He added that HomeChoice's service over the over the last month "has been sporadic due to numerous problems."

The attacks follow the loss by HomeChoice of customer emails last month, a problem it blamed on spammers. ®

Free whitepaper – Dell PowerEdge server benchmarks