AH Website attacks
 

Mystifying that we have now entered an era of people attacking AHs in the waning minutes of sports collectible auctions. Really? Bizarre. Who would be motivated to commit a serious crime simply to 'eff with the closing of someone's card and memorabilia auction? What is the universe of potential offenders who would care enough about this stuff. A competitor AH trying to make someone look incompetent? A disgruntled consignor or buyer who has been nursing a grudge for years? Just some bored ahole who likes to mess with people? Maybe someone who is in the process of winning something and wants to deter others from participating? I guess Goldin and other are looking into their situations. Crazy. I assume this is the kind of crime (interstate commerce) the FBI would be involved with and for which you could do some time away from family and friends.

How do you know they were attacked?

They were attacked just like this site was. I spoke to Ken about it. We are both doing things to prevent it but it's not as easy as one would think.

On our site the hosting company said they could see a ton of logins at the same time ie...brute force attack and that started our issues.

There are a lot of bad people out there and my hope is they get caught.

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Crazy. Unless they are pretty sophisticated I assume L.E. can make some quick headway in tracking them down.

Cyber attacks against US companies (in all industries) seem to be increasing exponentially across many business in the US. The US has more serious cyber attacks than any other country by far (3 times more than the UK over the past few years based on information in one report recently) and we are seen as being more vulnerable than ever due to COVID and domestic unrest. A few weeks ago, hackers went after some large US-based engineering firms. Cyber attacks are usually international sources (such as Russia, China, N. Korea, Iran, Vietnam) and the FBI usually gets involved very quickly. In many cases, the goal is simply to further disrupt US business and economy in many industries. So I highly doubt this issue stemmed from inside the US, as it rarely is, and a domestic source is usually much easier to find/prosecute.

I highly doubt that law enforcement is going to spend expensive technical resources to track down a cyber attack against a 100K - 200K advertising site and few million dollar auction house. There is no threat to national security, intellectual property, or wide scale personal data. These type of attacks happen all the time against much larger and more important entities.

Probably right about that. But never know. Someone in the local office might be having a slow day.

I disagree, while this site and Goldin wouldn't be among their top priorities. Terristitic cyberattacks such as this to try and upset our economy, I see think they would look into. Possible in hopes that they may be easier to find, but I really don't know.