Attrition abandons defacement mirrors

Onward and upward

Popular Internet security site attrition.org has reluctantly decided to cease maintaining its defaced Web-page mirrors because the burden of keeping up with all the busy crackers out there has finally become intolerable.

"In the last month, we have experienced single days of mirroring over one hundred defaced Web sites, over three times the total for 1995 and 1996 combined," the attrition staff explain in an announcement posted on the site Monday.

The increasing struggle to stay current has led to that old jaded, empty feeling. "A 'hobby' is supposed to be enjoyable. Maintaining the mirror is becoming a thankless chore," the group says.

And surely it can't be all fun and games, getting stuck between attackers and the attacked. "The abuse and ignorance we deal with from defacers and defacement victims is staggering, and some of that abuse spills over into actual attacks. Attrition has been taken down more than once by massive denial of service attacks which have inconvenienced our generous upstream provider .... and thousands of dialup customers, making our job even more difficult," the crew laments.

However, attrition will continue to publish what it considers its most useful service, the detailed statistics it maintains on defacements. "We will also continue to provide commentary and articles on high profile defacements, significant trends or other activity that warrants attention."

While we will miss the mirrors, which occasionally provided us considerable entertainment, we look forward to seeing what the site can become now that the staff are freed from the drudgery of maintaining them.

Oh, and one last thing. The Reg has absolutely no intention of taking up the slack here, so don't even think about jamming our inboxes with your defacement triumphs -- unless, of course, they're extraordinarily clever. ®