Reviewing iPhone may be dangerous

Many of you have probably logged on to Mobile-review.com - a great resource for news and reviews from the mobile world. Five days ago, it went down after being hit by a Denial of Service (DoS) hacker attack. Nothing unheard of here, as attacks on popular websites seem a favorite pastime for a certain group of people. What stuns the whole mobile community is the persistence of these attacks, which have been going on for all those five days putting the Mobile-review.com website down to its knees.

To put it simply, the Denial of Service attack is a brute force thing - it involves generating multiple queries to the targeted website. The machine that hosts the website gets so busy handling those queries, that it doesn't serve any content to regular users. Simple as it seems, in our days a Denial of Service attack capable of bringing down a big, popular website requires pretty solid planning and organizing, as it involves thousands of computers submitting queries to the website. Pulling off a stunt like that means the hackers were not simply counting on luck.

People at Mobile-review.com fear the attacks could have been organized in response to an unkind article on Apple iPhone. As of now, the real reason for this organized act remains unknown. However you can still read the article that allegedly triggered it all off right here, cached by Google.

Today, after five days under siege, Eldar Murtazin, the editor-in-chief of the Russian-based website, sent out an open letter in an attempt to raise the issue to the public. As he puts it:

"The attackers hope that by crushing Mobile-Review.com, they won't let our visitors get unbiased information on events in the mobile industry, read independent reviews and share their opinions on forums. In light of the fact that similar attacks can be performed by individuals or small groups of people, we regard this incident as an attempt to impose censorship in the Internet."

In the very same letter, Mr. Murtazin offers a 10 000 US dollar reward for anyone able to provide hard proof of the identity of the wrongdoers.

You can read the full text of the open letter by Eldar Murtazin.