WorldCat.org Response Time Issue Quickly Resolved; Attack on Servers Blocked
OCLC apologizes for poor response time on WorldCat.org during November 19 and 20. The OCLC servers that run WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local were attacked by processes initiated from nearly 2,000 IP addresses that proved to be registered to a single source. Our investigation revealed that these attacks seriously degraded response time for WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local users. OCLC blocked the attacks and response times returned to normal.
On November 22, 2008 at 6:30 PM Jeffrey Beall said:
Who perpetrated the denial-of-service attack against WorldCat.org?
On November 24, 2008 at 8:48 AM james gross said:
Worldcat blog Quote:"WorldCat.org is what we consider a free "end user" interface to the WorldCat database whereas FirstSearch is a librarian interface."
As a worldcat user I find myself being fustrated with the limited "end user" information. Firstsearch provides detailed information (depending on available info)regarding dates of publication and other relevant data. This just doesn't exist in worldcat. I feel a larger amount of the publication data, should be available for the end user.
I specifically feel that publication dates, which are important for books as well as newspapers, are essential for many searches. There are a number of academic researchers who do not have access to Firstsearch. It would be extremely helpful for researchers if the current limited information could be expanded.
On November 24, 2008 at 9:55 AM Alice Sneary
said:
OCLC has identified the source and we have been in contact with the organization to stop any further attacks.
On November 24, 2008 at 10:56 AM Bob Schulz
said:
Hi James. We do display publication dates as well as allow searching on date ranges through Advanced Search and limiting result sets to only items published in a specific year. If you could provide examples of items that should have publication dates but don't have them displayed, I'd be glad to look into it. Thanks.
On November 24, 2008 at 11:01 PM Tim Spalding said:
You're lucky you can find the source. We get hit occasionally in this way, but blocking them, as you did, is easy enough. The real problem are the bot nets. We've had thousands of machines hitting us at the same time, each from a separate IP. In our case it was spam, not DOS, but the problem is the same—it's very hard to block thousands of machines that are, in reality, just regular old PCs with some bot net virus running in the background.
On November 25, 2008 at 10:44 PM Billy Swordman said:
Nice to have Worldcat working normally. I hope Worldcat find the way to avoid the attack in the future. Success!
On December 1, 2008 at 1:21 PM Alice Sneary
said:
Thanks!