Why they keep on harping on one single issue? They run out of interesting news it is? Trying so hard to keep their readership up?
Temasek Review writes to SPH CEO Alan Chan to seek further clarifications
November 8, 2009 by admin
Filed under Top News
Mr Alan Chan
Chief Executive Officer
Singapore Press Holdings
Dear Mr Alan Chan,
RE: ARTICLE BY STRAITS TIMES JOURNALIST MR GEOFFREY PEREIRA ON 6 NOVEMBER 2009
We refer to the article by Mr Geoffrey Pereira which was published on the Straits Times digital edition on 6 November 2009 at 11.40am titled “Attack on Temasek Review: Not SPH” (read article here)
Mr Pereira claimed that Temasek Review had accused SPH of launching an internet attack on its site in an article published on 2 November 2009. We beg to differ.
Nowhere in the article did we ever accuse SPH of attacking our site via a DDOS or otherwise.
Our correspondent who drafted the article was not familiar with IT matters. We apologize if our article has caused some misunderstanding and we have already clarified the matter in subsequent articles.
We have never intended to implicate SPH with the DDOS attack on our server which had occurred a day earlier and we are sorry for any distress caused.
Please allow us to outline the sequence of events to give you a more complete picture of what had happened exactly.
Our servers are hosted with RTG (Asia) Network in a China Data Centre. On 1 November 2009 at about 12.10am, our correspondent received a phone call from our system administrator informing him that our newly installed anti-DDOS firewall had detected a flurry of network communication requests coming from the same IP address – 203.116.232.234.
A snapshot of our server log provided by our system administrator showed the IP address “grabbing” content from our site. The IP address was traced back to SPH by our data center.
According to our system administrator, this is not ordinary browsing, but “grabbing”. The manner by which contents are being accessed is consistent with search robots or a web grabber – i.e. a website is archived so that a string search can be made.
Our correspondent was told by our system administrator that such “grabbing” can potentially hog our server’s resources, but in this instance, it didn’t because the software firewall on the server itself banned the offending IP address minutes into the action after the IP address exceeded 60 connects per minute, the threshold set by the system administrator.
Technically, if the server were to be not protected by firewall and had been configured poorly, a multiple of requests in excess of 60 connects per minute would have brought our server down.
We were very concerned about the incident because our server was down for 8 hours during the previous day due to a DDOS attack which explained why we made the fateful decision to make it public in the hope that SPH can provide us with some answers since the IP address was traced back to it.
In his article, Mr Pereira had admitted that SPH employees were found to be visiting TR during the time period when the “grabbing” incident was alleged to take place during the period from 10 pm (31 Oct) to 1am (1 Nov).
His revelations corroborated with the findings on our server log which showed an IP address from SPH accessing/grabbing our content.
We hope SPH is able to provide us information on the following:
1. The identity of the employee or bot who was “grabbing” content from TR during the stated time period.
2. Is he/she using a web grabber software to do so?
3. What are his/her motives for “grabbing” our site.
We would like to appeal for your kind understanding and patience that we were quite traumatized by the earlier DDOS attack which disrupted accessibility to our site for almost an entire day and it was an unfortunate coincidence that an IP address from SPH was caught “grabbing” content from our site a day later.
We just want to obtain an understanding of what happened exactly so that it will allay our anxieties and set our hearts at ease that such uninvited “grabbing” of content on our site from SPH will either not occur again or is a routine “operation” by SPH which will not have a detrimental impact on our server.
Thank you very much for your time and attention and we hope to hear a favorable reply from you soon.
EDITOR
TEMASEK REVIEW