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Hackers hit controversial Education site

by on28 January 2010


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Government denies it


A controversial
education site crashed and burned after its launch but the Australian government seems keen to deny hacker involvement.

The site, which lists information about every Australian school, including national literacy and numeracy tests, went live at 1am but crashed shortly after. The government claimed that the My School website failed under a load of more than 2350 hits a second.

However anyone with a smattering of knowledge about the world wide wibble would know that is absolutely laughable. Access to the website was still slow and patchy at 10.30am today but load times were improving. A spokesman for the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), which developed the My School website, blamed the problem on an "overwhelming volume of traffic". A bizzare statement which was repeated by Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

"This website's got the capacity to take 1.7 million hits in 24 hours, that means it can take 2350 hits a second and even in the wee hours of the morning ... there was some time that it appears that more people than 2350 a second were trying to jump on," she said. However it is hard to think that there are enough people in Australia who are up at 1am and suddenly think “I know I will look at my kids school on the league tables”.

Gillard said within hours some 1.5 million people had tried to access the site this morning. Her office released statistics which showed the site received 80,000 hits between midnight and 1am. This ramped up to 290,000 between 1am and 2am and 400,000 between 6am and 7am.

‘‘We know that parents are hungry for this information," Ms Gillard told reporters in Sydney today. ‘‘Indeed they are so hungry for this information that the demand this morning has caused some problems.

Clearly she has never heard of the concept of a denial of service attack. The site is not popular as some schools and teachers think it is a jolly bad idea and mounting a DOS attack is a good way of shutting it down.
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