An invisible cyber assault has cut off access for the second day running to the Web site of the World Economic Forum (WEF), organizers of the gathering of the world's political and business elite confirmed on Friday.
The flood of traffic to the Web site at http://www.weforum.org began on Thursday afternoon, the first day of a five-day conference, and continued through Friday, with only intermittent let-up, a conference organizer said.
"What we do know is that too many hits on our Web site are shutting it down," spokesman Charles McLean told a briefing for reporters attending the summit on Friday.
"If it's in fact vandals, that's unfortunate because we are in the dialogue business and dialogue involves communication," he said. The Web site "is a way for us reaching out to people out in the streets."
The shutdown appeared to be an example of a common type of computer vandalism known as a "denial of service" attack. This involves overwhelming a site with false computer requests, rendering the information inaccessible to legitimate users.
Law-enforcement sources confirmed details of a Village Voice online account of the cyber vandalism on the WEF Web site, making it the second year in a row in which the event's Internet site has come under attack.
Last year, hackers broke into the WEF site and gained access to a private list of 27,000 names, including personal details such as credit card data and phone numbers of participants. An unidentified group of hackers calling themselves "Virtual Monkeywrench" took credit for that action.
The New York-based Village Voice newspaper said in its online edition that the RTMark, Electronic Disturbance Theater, and Federation of Random Action have taken credit for crashing the Web site.
According to law-enforcement professionals, a group calling itself "The Yes Men" released version 2.0 of Reamweaver, their automatic Web site parody software, and set it loose on the WEF Web site.
The software allows users to instantly redirect visitors from a site such as the official WEF home page to a new site dictated by users of the parody software. At the same time, Reamweaver allows users to change any words they choose.
For example, the first line on the official WEF Web site, "Reducing Poverty and Improving Equity," is turned into: "Reducing Uselessness and Improving Profit-Sharing."
"The Web site is one of the key ways of offering transparency and showing people what we are doing here," McLean said, but dismissed the breakdown as a nuisance rather than a major event.
"We would like to broadcast plenary sessions here," McLean said, referring to events at which speakers ranging from the US Secretary of State Colin Powell to rock star activist Bono have appeared.
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