JC, did you actually read the story?
Because if you did, you no doubt would have noticed the continuing lack of absolutely any evidence that there was something "malicious" going on:
Quote:
Paciolan's Butler said the second type of attack hit the purchasing system at the same time on Tuesday - 32,919,988 times.
"They were purely attempting to flood the site to bring it down," he said. "We're prepared for denial-of-service attacks, but we had never seen ... this variant."
However, computer-security experts say that while denial-of-service attacks of this scale do happen, the hackers' motives usually involve financial gain - which doesn't seem to be the case here.
"It sounds like the first two could have been really aggressive ticket-buying programs," said Johannes Ullrich, chief researcher for the SANS Institute, a group that trains network-security administrators and runs the Internet Storm Center that monitors new security threats.
"If you have millions of automated attempts, they end up blocking each other from sending information through," he said. "The denial of service is a side effect of these gold-rush moments."
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Again, absolutely no evidence of any "malice" in this attack. As Occam's Razor instructs us, when there is more than one possible explanation of a phenomenon, the simplest is preferred. Paciolan's explanation: unidentified but presumed "malicious" hackers organized a denial of service attack for no apparent reason, with non one taking credit for it later on. The alternative explanation of tech experts (see above, and the quotes from Dan Fox earlier in the thread): ticket-buying bots flooded the system, trying to gain any possible advantage in order to purchase an item that could be immediately resold at an approximately 400% markup.
But just try talking sense to a rabid conspiracy theorist ...