The Courier is reporting that the auction of assets from Realtime Worlds has been halted after hackers targeted the auction company’s servers:
Over 1000 items were to go under the hammer, including high-spec PCs, LCD screens, desks and other equipment.
However, the sale — conducted by Glasgow industrial auctioneers Sweeney Kincaid — was postponed after repeated attacks on the company’s computer servers.
The firm have now extended the sale until Sunday.
Russell Kincaid of the auction house said, “The sale had actually gone very, very well with hundreds and hundreds of buyers and thousands and thousands of inquiries.
“However, a lot of people were saying they had problems getting access to the website and there was an interruption in service as a result of several malicious attacks on our system.”
There’s no word on what the point of such an attack might have been, or why disrupting the auction would benefit anyone involved. Speculation on Twitter pointed towards failings at the auction company, rather than malicious external forces.
Its worth noting that the site went down not because of “hackers”, but because the site couldnt handle the traffic.
Few screenshots of the server dying throughout the day:
http://imgur.com/a/a9oyu/sweeney_kincaid
In particular, the 3rd image seems to indicate that there were too many open connections at once.
Of course, its always easier to blame the mysterious “bad guy hackers” than admit you dropped the ball.