BT hacked: revenge for crap service

Update We received an email at 10.20am this morning through a stoned.com account informing us that bt.com, btinternet.com and gameplay.com were all down.

The sender claimed credit for the denial of service attack and although he didn't leave an alias, he did give the reason behind his actions. "This is my payback to BT for ripping this country off. I'm tired of being cut off the net at 12 just because I have a cable line heres my payback :\," the email read.

We contacted BT who initially denied any such attack but rang back to confirm that the three sites mentioned were under attack and its techie staff were on the job.

All three sites were inaccessible, but gradually bt.com game back into service with the line "We are currently upgrading this site and some of the features are unavailable. The full service will be restored shortly. (Try using Shift+Reload to make sure you are not looking at an old version of this page)" displayed in bold on the front page.

At 11.40, an hour and twenty minutes later, normal service resumed on all three sites. Interestingly, the sites are now running at breakneck speed.

This afternoon, the unnamed person behind the DoS attacks responded to our attempts to contact him. Aside from drawing a distinction between DoS and hacking, it appears as though the attack was out of genuine fury at BT's Internet service.

An unedited excerpt from the email is given below. We are a little skeptical about the backbone claims but then we've been proved wrong before.

"Now onto the real reason I replied , I just want to take this opportunity to let BT know that if they don't fix their current policies on how long one can stay connected or whether the subscriber is using a cable phone line they can expect allot more of these lame floods. The next time I will school you hardcore.

"BT are dumb they wouldn't suspect anything even if I'd have taken down their backbone. The only reason BT came back online is because I stopped hitting them there is no cure for a bandwidth consumption attack. And the reason for stopping was to avoid a trace of the spoofing ack packets by going back one router hop at a time. If the machines I used wern't so valuable to me I'd have lets them stay offline." ®