Whirlpool is Australia’s largest technology forum and each day thousands of people contribute to discussions on the site, ranging from not only technology issues but also covering a wide range of topics.

I am one of them and yesterday night noticed the Whirlpool was down. Usually when Whirlpool goes down a maintenance message comes up but this time the site was just timing out. Figuring it was just heavy maintenance or something a little more involved I went to bed hoping it’d be up in the morning.

Not so.

Turns out Whirlpool has been the target of a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) over the last 24 hours or so.

DDOS in layman’s terms is what happens when a basement nerd somewhere unleashes his bandwidth fury at a specific target (usually a website or internet service) and causes the service or website to go down.

Usually it’s because someone insulted his or her favourite roleplaying game, accused Macs of being better then PC’s or some other such trivial nonsense.

In response to the attacks Whirlpool and their hosting company Bulletproof plan to hand over data to the Australian Federal Police.

Lorenzo Modesto, chief operating officer at Whirlpool’s hosting provider Bulletproof Networks, said the offending IP addresses were blocked within 20 minutes of the second attack starting. He said he has enough data on the attacks to pass on a solid lead to the Australian Federal Police.

“As a result of the latest Distributed Denial of Service attack, which started at approximately 9.40pm on Tuesday the 29th of June, Bulletproof Networks and Whirlpool will be reporting the recent DDoS activity targeting Whirlpool to the Australian Federal Police as defined under Commonwealth legislation within Part 10.7 – Computer Offences of the Criminal Code Act 1995, including denial of service attacks and distributed denial of service attacks using botnets,” Bulletproof told iTnews in a statement.


Whilst this sounds all legal and intimidating due to the nature of DDOS attacks and the general incompetency with the AFP when it comes to cybercrime, I’m assuming we’ll never know who’s behind the attacks or why they happened.

Stephen Conroy’s all for fighting imaginary villians with overbearing internet filters… but focusing on actual cyber crime?

‘Fuck it, we’ll let the portal sort itself out’.

DDOS attacks routinely employ the bandwidth of zombie computers worldwide and are directed by an individual or group who are usually smart enough to cover their tracks.

Given the target is Whrilpool, a technology forum and there’s no national security or massive amounts of money at stake I’m assuming the AFP will probably file the list of IP addresses sent to them in the ‘too hard’ or ‘we’ll get around to that later’ basket.

In response to the DDOS attacks Whirlpool seem to be content to just wait the attacks out. A recent Twitter update stated;

Whirlpool is going to be offline all day. Their attacks are no match for our laid-back attitude!

That’s all very well for Whirlpool but meanwhile there’s thousands of internet users around Australia going into serious discussion withdrawal. You think giving up cigarettes, alcohol, heroin, coffee or sex is bad…

…try taking away someone’s forums!

Work’s going to be a bitch today, ARGHHHHH!

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