Irish Times: "CAO.ie down due to 'cyber attack'". Really?

STBR

The CAO website cao.ie crashed this morning following a suspected cyber attack.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/0823/breaking6.html

I'm reasonably sure it's just the thousands of students hitting the servers. :rolleyes:

JaTochNietDan

Yeah I think that's jumping to conclusions. I find it hard to believe someone would initiate a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the CAO website at this specific time, maybe a really angry internet peoples didn't get a spot and decided to unleash his botnet in frustration?

I doubht it though, it's just a wave of people checking their application status.

RoRoCullen

ITS FINALLY BACK!

LadyGaga!

Sounds like someone didn't get their course and got a bit angry

UnionOfV

LadyGaga! wrote: »

Sounds like someone didn't get their course and got a bit angry

So, we're looking at an Irish student entering 3rd level education who didn't get his first choice and so happens to have access to some sort of a small botnet or private network? :rolleyes: I'm pretty sure if it was an attack there woudn't be too many suspects! :pac:

LadyGaga!

UnionOfV wrote: »

So, we're looking at an Irish student entering 3rd level education who didn't get his first choice and so happens to have access to some sort of a small botnet or private network? :rolleyes: I'm pretty sure if it was an attack there woudn't be too many suspects! :pac:

Why would anybody else target the CAO of all websites though!

It's also not as hard as you think to crash a website! You can use online tools to refresh a page every 3 seconds even!

UnionOfV

LadyGaga! wrote: »

It's also not as hard as you think to crash a website! You can use online tools to refresh a page every 3 seconds even!

This site is (well should) be equipped to cope with a sudden large increase in traffic for results day and today, so I wouldn't try to saturate it with a single machine. If it can (could) handle 70,000 people logging on at pretty much the same time, my little netbook refreshing the front page every few seconds isn't going to do much (though I'd love to try some day watch out class of 2011!!)

peanuthead

where can I actually get a copy of these results online?

Cant read the scanned ones and can't leave house to get paper

UnionOfV

If you mean your leaving cert results, you should have gotten login info in the mail a month or two back. You can use them to log into examinations.ie, although I think if you want an official statement of results you have to order it.

If you mean the points requirements for each course, google is your friend

LadyGaga!

peanuthead wrote: »

where can I actually get a copy of these results online?

Cant read the scanned ones and can't leave house to get paper

Someone put this up: http://gavreilly.com/cao2010/

jackburke

Here's an interesting article on the CAO attack that says it may have easily been averted with some proper coding practices.

http://www.dot-ie.com/2010/08/cao-website/