Motion Picture groups site DoSd Computer vandals are suspected as MPAA.org is inaccessible By Bob Sullivan MSNBC April 13  The Web site for the Motion Pictures Association of America is currently suffering intermittent outages, and the organization suspects computer vandals are to blame, MSNBC has learned. A spokesperson for the organization MPAA is currently experiencing problems with our public Web site and we suspect a denial of service attack. Earlier today, the organizations e-mail service was also interrupted. The attack was first rumored on HackerNews.com, a Web site for computer hackers

IT APPEARS were having some kind of a disruption of our service but nothing we cant surmount, spokesperson Rich Taylor said. He said attempts to disrupt the site began on Wednesday, and the organization believed it was the victim of a targeted denial of service attack. They appear to be flooding the server with requests. He said the associations e-mail services had been restored earlier on Thursday, and it was thought the site would be back online shortly.

However, the site  at www.mpaa.org  was completely inaccessible to MSNBC for the better part of Thursday. Its a nuisance but not a catastrophe, he said. In its initial report of the rumor, HackerNews.com said the Web site had been offline for about 24 hours. The news service also predicted other sites connected to the MPAA will come under attack in coming days. FOCUS OF DVD BATTLE The Motion Picture Association of America is at the center of a brewing Internet controversy over decryption of DVD movies. Last year, independent computer scientists discovered how to crack the encryption which prevents consumers from copying DVD movies. The MPAA has since been working to remove that information from public Web sites. It sued Eric Corley (who is also known as Emmanuel Goldstein) and his company, 2600 Enterprises, after the information was published on Corleys site. On Jan. 20, the MPAA won an injunction against Corley and two other sites, prohibiting them from posting the software. But it is still available on hundreds of other Web sites. The outage at MPAA.org is reminiscent of the massive attacks that took down Yahoo, Amazon, and several other top Web sites in February. HackerNews said a massive distributed denial of service attack was rumored to be the cause; the source inside MPAA refused to comment. Taylor said so far, no one has taken credit for the attacks or otherwise tried to contact the MPAA wit information on why the Web site was targeted.

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), April 16, 2000