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Telegraph floored by DDoS attack

Bowled over

The website of UK broadsheet the Daily Telegraph is returning to normal after a sustained denial of service attack left the site intermittently unavailable over the last two days.

Unknown hackers bombarded the telegraph.co.uk with thousands of spurious requests from around 9am yesterday morning. The site was largely unavailable but returned to service at around 11am today before dropping offline at 2pm and returning later this afternoon. Such a pattern is not unusual for denial of service attacks as hackers vary patterns of attack while defenders establish defences designed to offload spurious traffic.

The paper blamed the attack, the most serious of a number it has faced to date, on "vandalism". The website recently introduced a redesign, adding a new blog section and news tool, My Telegraph. Both services operated from a separate server and were therefore not affected by the attack, New Media Age reports.

Cyber-attacks have been much in the news of late. Last week, Russian and European leaders held a summit in the aftermath of a three-week cycle of denial of service attacks targeting the Baltic countries' internet infrastructure.

Estonian officials said they had traced back the IP addresses involved in the attack to the address space of the Russian government, prompting speculation that the attacks were officially sanctioned, though the use by hackers of compromised Russian government systems is another possibility. ®

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