Wednesday, October 24, 2007 |
Rockies Blame Hackers For World Series Ticket Fiasco
Late yesterday, Keli McGregor, Rockies team president, said the outage was the result of a coordinated effort by unknown outsiders. "Our Web site, and ultimately our fans and our organization, were the victim of an external, malicious attack that shut down the system and kept our fans from being able to purchase their World Series tickets," McGregor said in a statement.There's some chatter in the comments following the article that the problem is insufficient server resources, but given that Paciolan is a known Microsoft lover, that might be only part of the problem. Microsoft servers, especially for database-driven transactions, just don't scale well, at least in my experience. Of course, if I'm wrong about their backend, then, never mind.Paciolan, which handles the online ticket sales for Colorado and several other Major League Baseball teams, said the system outage affected all its North American customers. TicketMaster in July announced a bid to acquire the Irvine, Calif.-based firm for an undisclosed sum, in a deal that is still under government review.
Paciolan, couldn't be reached for comment on the cause of the outage.
Solution providers said a distributed denial of service attack on Paciolan's online ticketing system is the most likely cause of the outage.
Update: The Rocks finally did sell out their World Series ticket inventory. Interesting sidebar:
Dave Marcus of McAfee Avert Labs, the research arm of antivirus software maker McAfee Inc., said it sounded like Paciolan didn't configure its software correctly to kick off users that were trying to trick the system.Or just failing to prepare adequately. You use stupid tools, you will get hammered. This application just isn't that hard to deal with."I wouldn't call that malicious. It's just someone trying to buy more tickets than they're allowed to in an automated way," he said.
But Alves said it was malicious because it was an attempt to disrupt the Rockies' ticket distribution method. MLB.com spokesman Matt Gould agreed because he said their attempts locked fans out of buying tickets Monday.
"There were people who schemed to cause a disruption in what is a landmark moment in Rockies franchise history," he said. "That's malicious any way you define it."
Labels: postseason, rockies
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