Whale under attack

NBR reports:

Cam Slater’s Whaleoil site was offline early this afternoon after being swamped by a denial-of-service attack (which sees a malicious hacker buy space on a network of hijacked PCs to send an avalanche of connection requests that overwhelm a website’s capacity).

“It’s a DoS attack, originating in New Zealand,” Mr Slater told NBR.

The site went down several times last night under DoS attack, then was taken offline completely at around 8am this morning.

The controversial blogger has no shortage of enemies. He named a couple of people covered by recent Whaleoil stories whom he thought could be responsible for today’s attack – but you’ll have to wait until his site goes back online to read those (so far) unsubstantiated allegations.

“I have also been getting death threats via text and on Facebook,” Mr Slater told NBR. 

The cellphone and Facebook threats do not seem to be related to the DoS attack; it’s just a particularly bad day at the Whaleoil office.

“I have notified police, especially [over] the text messages,” Mr Slater said.

The death threats are bad enough, but the threats against Cam’s children are so far beyond the pale that I hope those responsible are getting visited by the Police.

The DOS attacks are probably unrelated, but obviously are arranged by someone who thinks that a site that says something you disagree with should be closed down.

Hopefully Whale Oil will be back online in the near future.