Well at least they know where the attack originated from.

I would be fine if we just separated that third rate city and its consistently drunk citizens from the country.

That traitor Rudy can go to hell also.

the system had been overloaded by powerful computers programmed to constantly generate five-digit codes that are meant to prove that an actual human is trying to buy tickets.

This story is *much* more amusing if you picture them misinterpreting the ginormous influx of traffic from actual people who can't read captchas.

"WHY ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE ON OUR SERVERS?"
"MUST BE HACKERS!"

THE web server? As in, singular? I think that's the real problem here.

@Galls: What the hell are you talking about? What city? Boston, New York, Denver, or Irvine?

Good thing to know the FBI cares more about some website failing to have enough capacity (I doubt this was a deliberate DDOS, just stupidity on some scalpers' part) than it does about hard-core criminals who want to do actual harm to people, as in rape, injure, torture, kill, etc.

@Buran: Well, since the FBI has divisions and departments, I'm guessing just those that are tasked to handle computer and internet crimes are handling this case. The ones who profile serial killers, track criminals, and search for aliens probably weren't involved in this.

@Buran:

You just reminded me of a story one of my cop friends told me a few days ago.

They arrested a burglar who had robbed several apartments, when they brought him in, he was yelling at them about how come they don't catch "real criminals" like rapists and murderers instead of wasting their time catching him.

I was cracking up.

Meh. The Rockies are 0-2 in the World Series. You didn't really want those tickets anyway.

I'd wager that the company has a pretty hefty QoS clause in their contract with the rockies, and in order to get out of it, would have to classify the server crashes as a malicious attack.

Not saying that scalpers didn't cause it, but I'm going to guess that it wasn't their intent to cause a DDoS. I'll instead wager that their intent was t buy as many tickets as possible. we will never know if the ticket server would have dropped like a rock under the regular load, but it certainly didn't know how to deal with requests that were outside (maybe) protocol.

Shame on the company for getting slashdotted and brining the feds in because of it.

I guess my company was one of the 31337 hax0rs. We have several thousand people in Colorado behind one web proxy server. I can't wait for the FBI to raid us.

The story isn't from ESPN. It's from the Associated Press and ESPN just republished it like a lot of other websites did.

The four-letter sports network does very little reporting of the news. They mostly just recycle the reporting done by others.