Paul Strouse \nMINNEAPOLIS - The Internet's most visited adult site in January got early March visitors it didn't want - Porncity.net was hit with a spam-bombing denial-of-service attack March 2 which was similar to the DOS attacks that froze Yahoo! and other high-profile Web sites early last month.
"We're pretty much just finishing now trying to pull logs," Porncity chief operating officer Paul Strouse told AVN On The Net at about 5:15 p.m. central standard time. At that point, Porncity was 80 percent back and running and expected to be at full strength within the following hour. "It was pretty comprehensive. The whole site was pretty much down a solid two to two and one half hours." Identifying those responsible won't be easy, he says. "We can't tell who was responsible until we get all the logs and start trying to track back. The FBI is informed, local authorities are informed, but that's just something that time will tell if we can trace it back or not."
Strouse would not even make a guess as to how long it would take to identify the culprits. "It depends on how much information we can pick off the logs," he said. "In order to do a full-scale search, we'd have to shut everything down, and there's just no easy way to do that. I'm not going to write six million e-mails a day."
The hack began at 2 p.m. CT, Strouse said. "They didn't put up any substitute pages, it was just a DOS, except that they did it a little differently. With us, they used a name server - they weren't requesting information, they were doing a name lookup and they bounced it out."
Porncity didn't know precisely what kind of information packets were used in the attack. "We won't know that for a little while longer," Strouse said, adding Porncity was waiting for more analysis from their routers in Arizona and Virginia. He says the dissimilarity in the attack method from the Yahoo! attack wasn't necessarily something to do with Porncity being an adult Web site. "If they do it one way one time, they might do it differently a second time," he says. "I would assume the publicity had to do with that. If you're going to do that kind of attack again, those bases would be covered and you'd try something a little bit different."
