It was with much excitement and anticipation that the team at Bloodstockauction headed into Tuesday nights final countdown.
With over 63 individual bidders having already placed bids, high interest and level of enquiry received by vendors and the membership number edging over 900 registered members everything looked on track for a successful first auction.
This was until exactly 3 minutes before the first lot was due to complete when a massive demand was placed on the server causing the site to crash. The fast acting tech team was able bring the site back as management made the decision to set the auction back 1 hour. With everything working as normal the auction neared the final few minutes of the first lot, when as occurred earlier, the server crashed.
At a loss to explain the result, the directors made the difficult but inevitable decision to postpone the auction for 2 days.
24 hours have passed and specialists have reviewed the data from Tuesday night and are certain that these events were the result of a calculated and deliberate attack on the websites infrastructure. Commonly known as a DdOS attack, the attack involves overloading the site with requests, so much so that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered essentially unavailable. Such attacks usually lead to a server overload. This matter is now in the hands of the police.
The team have been in contact with all members who have placed bids to advise of the situation, and is overwhelmed by the understanding that has been granted even before we could advise that an attack was the cause.
As it stands the auction will go ahead with the first lot completing at 7pm Thursday the 18th of December with all bids that had been placed over the last week standing. Further auctions will revert to the standard first and third Tuesdays of each month.
On
a brighter note, Sigmund who was due to sell Tuesday night and had attracted
bids to $20,000, went to Toowoomba on Wednesday and duly saluted, winning by
2.3L.
Sigmund is still part of the auction and joins Jeb's Boy and Supercoach as horses who have won since the catalogue was released.
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