Tuesday November 23, 2010

Oh no! Hackers hit firm’s Yes portal

By SUBASHINI SELVARATNAM
intech@thestar.com.my

PETALING JAYA: YTL Communications claims their web portal has been attacked, causing problems for subscribers to the company’s newly-launched Yes 4G broadband service.

YTL Comms chief executive officer Wing K. Lee said the attack swamped the portal with hundreds of thousands of requests for subscriptions, which prevented legitimate subscribers from accessing the system.

“We were getting as many as 300,000 hits per second,” he said.
As a result, he added, YTL Comms had to take lengthy steps over the weekend to filter individual blocks of IP addresses in order to circumvent the fake requests.

Wing said more than 15,000 subscribers had been enjoying the Yes service since Friday, adding that only a small percentage of customers were affected by the attack on the portal.

The company said it listed its Yes Care phone-support number on the portal on Sunday afternoon as an additional channel to handle customer queries. It also said that the number was publicised via social media networks.

Cherry Siow, 27, an operations executive, said she had pre-registered her Yes account before the Friday launch in Kuala Lumpur.

“After I had received a notification that my account was activated, I tried to log in but was unable to. The website showed that my Yes ID didn’t exist.”
On Monday, Yes Care sent her an e-mail response, saying that the Yes service was “currently experiencing some minor technical glitches, whereby there would be difficulty in accessing the Yes portal intermittently.”

Another subscriber, Ong Soo Thiah, 28, a software quality assurance engineer at Seagate Sdn Bhd, also complained that he had been unable to log in to his account since Friday. He, too, had pre-registered for the service.

“I complained to Yes Care via its Twitter account and have yet to receive an answer. I think this (level of service) is unacceptable, “ he said in an e-mail interview with The Star.

Seline Lau, 27, a marketing executive at a cosmetics company, was one of the subscribers who had her account activated over the weekend.

She went to the Yes store at Lot 10 on Saturday. “It took about 15 minutes to get the paperwork done at the counter. Activation takes about two hours and by the time I reached home, I could surf,” she said.