Student portal gal.co.za (Get A Life) has been brought to a standstill by unknown hackers over the past four days. The site, which is known for its often-contentious online games, is due to release a new game based on political floor-crossing later this week.
The denial of service attack, which the group says appears to be targeting the GAL site particularly, has caused the site to be down for the last four days.
This is not the first time the organisation`s Web site has been attacked. In June 2000, the site was hacked more than 10 times in a single week by a group opposed to the "Squirt Diesel at Mugabe" game. This time, however, group editor Nechama Brodie is not convinced the attack is a political one, although she does say it appears to be targeted.
"The new game targets floor-crossing in general and not any individuals, so it is unlikely to have attracted negative attention.
"But it`s obvious someone is trying to shut us up. We have established that, of several sites sharing the same box on our server, gal.co.za was the only one to be hit. In fact, the amount of traffic generated in the attack seems to indicate there were literally thousands of computers hitting the site at the same time ... which means the hackers compromised several other networks and combined them to attack gal.co.za directly, while ignoring other sites that would have been available to them."
She says only the Web site has been affected by the attack, and not the other e-commerce, e-mail and transaction services offered by the student group.
The group intends to go ahead with the launch of the game in the next few days, despite the site still struggling under heavy request loads, making it largely unavailable. Brodie says alternative plans have been made for the launch if the attack continues, and the site may be temporarily relocated for the launch of the new game while the issue is resolved.
"Whoever or whatever is behind this latest attempt won`t affect the overall running of the group of Web sites."
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