30th March 2011
We are aware that a denial of service attack on our systems has been inaccurately reported in the press.
The report dated March 24th, credited to Eric W. Dolan, appears (amongst other places) on a site called the Raw Story and claims that ‘The decentralized community of hacktivists known as “Anonymous” knocked the website of the UK Copyright Service offline on Thursday’.
Our site was not in fact ‘knocked offline’ by the attack, and we have not been contacted by Mr Dolan to verify any of the details in his report.
The facts
Our Internet facing web-servers were targeted on both Monday 14th and Friday 25th of March in what appears to have been prolonged distributed denial of service attacks. We did see increased traffic on our network on both those dates. The attacks did not take down our site. Our firewalls and routers were able to filter out virtually all of the traffic and our site continued to operate normally throughout the attacks.
Comment
We are very surprised to have been targeted by the Anonymous group in this way: Our service was set up by creative individuals to support creative individuals. Most of our clients are individuals and smaller companies who are simply trying to secure evidence to help defend their rights if they are victim to illegal exploitation of their work – hardly the corporate faceless giants that activist groups tend to target.
The observant reader may also have noticed an inconsistency in the dates: The last increase in network traffic happened on Friday 25th of March, but the report is dated Thursday 24th (the day before) - we leave you to draw your own conclusions from that.
News items
3rd August 2011: Government acceptance of Hargreaves report.
30th March 2011: Denial of service attempt - inaccurate media reports.
6th June 2009: Sponsorship of the Marie Curie Daffodil Theatre Awards.
7th May 2009: Partnership with the British Library.
6th March 2009: Support for British Library courses.
15th January 2009: International Maestro now accepted.
23rd May 2008: Upgrades to our network.
25th September 2007: Greater convenience and security for online registrants.
1st February 2007: Online renewal and ordering launched.
14th March 2006: Registered notice labels launched.
28th February 2006: American Express cards accepted.
14th June 2005: Online registration updates launched.
18th May 2005: Online registration launched.
1st August 2004: Registration updates launched.
28th May 2004: New web site launch.
6th April 2004: Copyright Witness - The international face of the UK Copyright Service.
