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ISP Forced Out of Business by DoS
flyhmstr writes "According to a report on ISPReview Cloud Nine have been forced off line and out of business thanks to the actions of crackers deciding to go play with some DoS tools." It's only getting worse.
The kids are getting more and more aggressive as time goes on and
it gets easier and easier to launch a large scale DoS. As any
techie knows, fixing the problem is far easier said then done... but
as a frequent recipient of the sharp end of the DoS stick, I sure
wish it wasn't an issue.
IANAS(ysadmin), but this doesn't quite add up for me. Do they really need to go out of business? Heck, if the company is "solvent", it seems to me they could find a way to survive. In the worst case, they switch upstream providers, get new IP addresses for all their boxes, and even change domain names. Yes this is huge pain in the ass for everyone (especially customers), but I can't imagine that shuttering is any more convenient.
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Today looks set to be a sad and frustrating one for anybody who was ever a customer of the once popular unmetered dialup and broadband ISP Cloud-Nine.
At precisely 10:16am a few minutes ago Emeric Miszti (CEO) and John Parr (Operations Director) of the C9 ISP posted what's likely to be their final announcement on our forums. C9 is now the latest ISP to close, although it's the first we've ever seen to go from a hack attack!:
Cloud Nine regret to announce that at 7:45 this morning the decision was taken to shut down our Internet connections with immediate effect.
We tried overnight to bring our web servers back online but were seeing denial of service attacks against all our key servers, including email and DNS. These were of an extremely widespread nature.
We felt we had a moral duty not to expose our customers to possible attacks as well.
We must thank BT for all the help they provided us with in trying to bring these attacks to an end. We worked with them for the last few weeks to investigate this problems but ultimately we did not believe that we could survive these attacks and that it would be in the best interests of both ourselves and our customers to close our Internet service and seek a transfer of our services to another ISP.
We now wish to initiate a speedy transfer of servers, domain names, etc to interested Surftime ISP's and NT portfolio hosters since this would be the quickest way to get the affected customers online again. Please contact John Parr on 07740 423993 if interested.
We want to thank our customers for all the support over the last few days. Ultimately these attacks denied the service not to us but to many thousands of British businesses and ordinary people - this was an attack against everyone with no consideration for anyone!
The company is solvent but if a sale of assets cannot take place quickly then an administrator will be appointed. We have had to pay our excellent staff to the end of the month and we feel really sorry for them as well and would like to thank them for all their efforts over the years and the commitment shown over the last few difficult days.
All the directors are feeling absolutely gutted since we have all spent nearly 6 years building this company and its reputation to see it destroyed by a brazen act of cyber terrorism - well at this moment we can think of no words to express our true feelings.
Emeric Miszti
CEO
John Parr
Operations Director
We're extremely sorry to see them go, not least because they often provided a very important insight into the internal wrangling that goes on between ISP and operator, it often goes unmentioned.
However the fact that such a long standing ISP was forced out of business by hackers is also of great concern and will no doubt be picked up on by the media. We can only hope they catch the people involved.