Zooomr meets dooomr (temporarily) Saturday, July 15, 2006
Sadly the launch of Zooomr v2.0 which was due to go live at 1am GMT on 15 July was hit by a DOS and caused them to temporarily abort. Thomas Hawk, one of the 3 people involved in the venture, is well known in the blogosphere and commented on the Zooomr blog that perhaps it was inevitable that they should have been hit. This is because there has been a considerable amount of online chatter about the launch but also because they posted a "cool" looking countdown clock on the site which somebody clearly saw as a challenge to interupt - the online countdown clock was halted at 11 minutes to go.
The sad reality is that small online commercial "start-ups" still have to take the same precautions and counter-measures as larger corporations to tackle this kind of threat particularly when a)they get a high profile b) headline a key date c) their whole existence relies on their online availability. A large corporate that also has a bricks and mortar presence might be able to weather the storm from other revenues, whereas an online service is wholly reliant on this channel for its revenues. Clearly this also exposes it to intimidation - I recall one of the better card processing services in the UK, Protx, being hit by a DOS two years back. Not only was it unable to do business (DOS attackers wanted to be paid c£10k) but also all the customers that relied on it to process their card transactions were unable to do business during the outage.
Hopefully, Zooomr will be back on its feet soon, but its' a useful reminder to budding online entrepneurs that sometimes the obvious steps to protect a bricks & mortar business (locks and alarms) have their equivalents in the online world and shouldn't be ignored in the hope that their venture won't be targeted.
posted by John Wilson @ 9:17 AM Permanent Link
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