<nettime> EDT deny responsibility for closing the WEF site

["ricardo dominguez" <rdom@thing.net>]

Hacktivists Stage Virtual Sit-In at WEF Web site

Noah Shachtman, AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12374

February 7, 2002

Although the streets of New York City remained relatively subdued while
the World Economic Forum (WEF) met here, over 160,000 demonstrators
went online to stage a "virtual sit-in" at the WEF home page.

Using downloaded software tools that constantly reloaded the target web
sites, the protestors replicated a "denial-of-service" attack, which
cripples
a webserver by sending it more requests than it can handle. 40,000
downloaded
the sit-in tool on Thursday, January 31st, the first day of the WEF meeting.

"We're getting hits like we've never had before," WEF communications
director Charles McLean reported as the protest began.

By 10 AM Thursday, the WEF site had collapsed, and remained
down until late Friday night.

"At first, the [WEF] website got more general traffic than it had
experienced before. Then, [the site] had what appeared to be
an intentional denial-of-service attack, which made it impossible
for people to access content," said Paul Sagan, president of
Akamai Technologies, which was called in by the WEF to get its
site up-and-running again, and to shield the WEF's web fare from
additional protests.

Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT),
one of the groups that organized the sit-in, called the
action a "global ya basta -- enough is enough!"

MORE
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12374

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