King World News, GoldSilver.com, Liberty Coin & Precious Metals (and more!) Denial of Service Conspiracy?

King World News recently made headlines when their servers went “under guard” due to an attack on their server. But, King World News is not the only online gold and silver site to go down, as reported by the Bernank at Compare Silver Prices.com. But first, the GATA post on the KWN service denial.

“The King World News Internet site was attacked this week in ways that seemed aimed particularly at the network’s revelatory interview April 5 with its London metals market trader source.

The major Internet hosting company that maintains the King World News site reported to the network: “The servers you are hosted on are what we call ‘under guard’ due to external attack. Sometimes there are millions of these attacks. Without these ‘guards’ in place, the servers would effectively become flooded and would be unable to display your website.”

Eric King told GATA today: “The attacks started when the London trader interview piece was released April 5. The attacks continued and intensified when our interview with Jim Sinclair’s futures market analyst, Dan Norcini, was published on April 11. A very powerful entity did not want this information out there.”

King World News experienced a similar “distributed denial of service” attack in March 2010 immediately after it carried an interview with three GATA board members.

According to Wikipedia, a distributed denial-of-service attack “is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DDoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely.”

This week’s attack blocked access to the King World News site for some of its readers around the world. After many hours of work by the site’s staff, access has been restored.

In a way, these attacks are a tribute to the work done by King World News and the sensitivity of the observations made by the people interviewed there.”

Curiously, on April 1, Bernank at Compare Silver Prices made a post about a trend he had been noticing. As it turns out, in monitoring the websites of the United States’ gold bullion and silver bullion dealers, different dealers’ websites were going down by way of, most likely, the same techniques as KWN. The Bernank writes that websites like Liberty Coin & Precious Metals and Goldsilver.com have gone down in recent times:

“Are you a precious metals dealer and have you experienced compromised web performance on your website, whether it be slow load times, or total removal from the world wide web? Get in touch, Bernank wants to know…

It has come to my attention, through the processes of coding the compare metals tools, that many dealers, including but not limited to:

_______________________

Goldinfo.net (still down)

LibertyCPM.com

GoldSilver.com

TexMetals.com (still experiencing downtime)

ProvidentMetals.com (was down for almost half the day today)

_______________________

have experienced significant downtimes in the past 2 week period. According to my data crawling tool, it appears that these websites were taken out relatively simply, through a brute force distributed denial of service attack. My hunch on this is basically because my tool grabs all of those dealer pages every 45 seconds, and records the prices, the time taken to record, and other statistics. All cases of these bullion dealers being taken down were very sudden. The time taken to grab the metal prices did not expand in a linear fashion, but rather, my data gathering tool reports that literally in between the 45 second interval, the websites went from reporting at avg. response time, to being unresponsive. This type of behavior is most easily explained by a distributed denial of service attack. A distributed denial of service attack can be done with as little as 1 computer (if a webserver is configured improperly and does not limit connections per IP address) or up to 10,000 for a large, load-balanced, “smart’ system which automatically tries to filter bad traffic out instead of letting it flood the traffic gates of your server.

I understand some of these website take downs were for what was ascribed to “routine maintenance’ but really, based on the results I’m seeing here, I think some dealers need to come out and let the public in on the extent to which they are targets for what can only be described as cyber crime, on the web. I cannot hypothecate on the true nature of these attacks without more information. However, it is my firm belief that, unless it is some coincidence that 5 of the major online bullion dealers have taken to doing maintenance within a very tight, similar timeframe, my hunch is that these patriots have been subject to unwarranted and extremely prejudiced cyber crime.

So please, if you are a bullion dealer and have been experiencing these sorts of issues, feel free to reach out to me at Bernank AT compare silver prices DOT com (replace @ and . ) I would like to hear more about your stories, perhaps we can all work together to shed some light on what is surely an unconstitutional afternoon hobby for some nerd at the NSA.

Till I finish paying off the debt on this East African Studies Degree,

Bernie Shmuelle”

So, it appears that, via denial of service, many websites promoting or selling competing currencies to the Federal Reserve Note have experienced down-times due to periods of intense traffic. Bernank at Compare Silver Prices suggests that “national interests” are behind the denial of service attacks. I agree with his sentiment, but could it be that major banks are the owners of the servers from whence the bombardment came?