Hacker Attack Disables Official NHL Web Site 'Denial of Service' Shutdown Comes Amid Playoffs May 24, 2000

NEW YORK (AP) -- NHL officials are trying to find who disabled the league's official Web site.

Tom Richardson, general manager of the NHL's Interactive Cyber Enterprises (ICE), said today it was uncertain if one or more hackers had gotten into the site, NHL.com.

"It's a very serious situation," he said. "We are taking all steps necessary to get to the bottom of this and find the culprit or culprits.

"We are in the midst of our playoffs, and we are very disappointed that this has happened at such an inopportune time.

"We have notified authorities to try and filter out the bogus requests."

Problem detected Monday

Richardson said the problem was discovered Monday.

"At some point Sunday, there was a distributed denial of service," he said. "Someone was flooding the pipeline with bogus requests through distributed PCs. The whole system was overloaded [with millions of Web page requests]. But the Internet was not compromised.

"We had spotty service yesterday, and it's continuing today. We're still trying to fix it."

The situation is similar to the problems that affected Yahoo, eBay, E*Trade, CNN, Amazon.com and other leading Web sites in February

http://www.apbnews.com/newscenter/internetcrime/2000/05/24/nhlweb0524_01.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), May 24, 2000