YLE’s Website and Finnish Websites Under Attack
15 May 2007 in Root | Comments enabled
The homepage of YLE – the Finnish Broadcasting Company –, Finnish Eniro and Suomi24 — a Finnish portal — have been under a so called website flood attack or (in geek speak) denial of service attack that started yesterday. According to Helsingin Sanomat, the attack started yesterday and continued today with the attacker, or more presumably attackers, adapting to the defenses put up by YLE.
The same article by HS quotes the Finnish Ministry of Communication as claiming this to be the largest attack on a Finnish website to date. The last big attack was on F-Secure a few years back.
The interesting part here is that no-one either mentions the reason of the attack (if they know it) or genuinely do not know why someone is attacking them. Since the severity of the attack is quite extensive, it seems like someone is commandeering a zombie network of compromised computers to attack the websites in question. There is a possibility that the attackers have tried getting money from the websites as a protection payment, and when the websites didn’t cough up the dough, the attack started.
F-Secure recently said on their weblog that this method of blackmailing hasn’t been working well for the attackers so most of them have switched to other methods of illegally gaining money.
I can’t figure why someone would try to attack YLE for other than money… not that YLE has money to spare. I’m paying them 200+ € in TV-license fees already and all of that has gone to ensure digital TV in Finland (I personally suspect 
). Ok, there are two highly unlikely possibilities to why someone might want to attack YLE:
- the digital TV mess
- disgruntled Eurovision Song Contest fans
But I think I can safely assume that no-one of the above options have enough resources to initiate a destructive DoS attack. 
Leave a Comment