Internet Web Economics - Page A2
December 18, 1996 Internet Star Wars Cause
by Staff Writers, The Daily Republican Newspaper
3,000 Web Site Casualties Saturday!
PALO ALTO DESK - Internet Star Wars! An Internet sneak attack against WebCom, one of California's large Internet service providers, caused more than 3,000 Web sites to go off-line for Saturday and most of Sunday in he midst of the busiest holiday shopping season.
Thomas Hobbs,CEO of WebPortal.Com of Palo Alto, said the Internet attack over the week-end did not affect any of his California CyberMall subscribers and customers. Hobbs said that his firm has created a server network design that protects his business customers from such Internet wars. Hobbs said, like thousands of other Internet service providers, WebCom of Santa Cruz, California has no protection against such attacks. WebCom had its service interrupted from early Saturday morning.WebCom service was not restored until Sunday afternoon.
WebCom Communications' chief, Chris Schefler said that WebCom designed and published Web pages and provided storage space on its computer from which the sites run. But, because of the Internet attack WebCom was unable to respond to any of its subscribers or their customers.
Another such Internet attack brought down a New York Internet service provider, Public Access Networks Corp. for more than a week in September.
WebCom technicians immediately began searching for the origin of the problem. Then engineers contacted PSINet the Internet service provider that supplies the WebCom connection to the Internet. The attack's route was traced to Internet communications lines owned by MCI Communications Corp. the nation's second-largest telecommunications company.
MCI then traced the attack to an Internet service provider based in Ontario, Canada, called CANet. From there, MCI traced it to a small network provider in Vancouver, British Columbia called BC.Net.
MCI blocked all Internet traffic from CANet to WebCom.Eventually, WebCom customers' web pages came back online.
The Internet outage caused a severe economic loss to WebCom business customers.
Associated Press reports on Tuesday quoted Tina Koening, a WebCom web page customer as saying 'The timing was horrendous. In my situation, it's basically the largest mail-order weekend for my business!' Koenig is in Hollywood, Florida. She runs a web storefront called Cybercalifragilistic which sells computer-theme gift products and holiday greeting cards you can buy and send right on the Internet.