GATA: Attack on King World News site meant to shut it down

King World News today received more detail about yesterday's attack on its Internet site, which happened soon after the posting of Eric King's half-hour interview with GATA Chairman Bill Murphy, board member Adrian Douglas, and your secretary/treasurer about last week's hearing of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The major Internet hosting company that maintains the King World News site reported to King World News: "Your hosting account is the target of a distributed denial of service attack. To protect the network resources, we have temporarily placed your Web site behind a network filter. Once the attack has ended, service will be restored to normal. ... Computers were attacking your account."

Wikipedia says a distributed denial-of-service attack "is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DDoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely."

Eric King told GATA today, "We are on one of the top grid server systems in the world, where traffic is not an issue, and this has never happened before. This was a case of an entity needing to silence the messenger."

No Internet site has given as much voice to GATA and other pro-gold and free-market advocates as King World News has, so given the scope of the attack on the the King World News Internet site, it is hard not be awfully suspicious about it.

King's interview with Murphy, Douglas, and your secretary/treasurer can be found here:

http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2010/3/31_GATA.html

Meanwhile, GATA's friend Trace Mayer, proprietor of RunToGold.com, reports that his March 28 commentary on last week's hearing of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission --

http://www.runtogold.com/2010/03/cftc-gold-and-silver-hearing-is-old-news/

-- was followed by a similarly massive attack on RunToGold's Internet server. "To handle spikes in traffic," Mayer says, "I am on an expensive enterprise-level cloud server with a company that handles hosting for some of the big dogs, like Sony and Toyota, and my server got hammered. The site was down for 2 1/2 hours, from about noon to 2:30p PT on March 30. There were no issues with my hosting provider and it appears we have everything under control now. I have never had an issue like this before. Anyway, it looks like we have someone's attention. Keep yanking on that tail."

GATA indeed will keep yanking on that tail but our friends also risk getting bitten. We're grateful to them for that.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer

Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.