Filipino journalist’s blog gets spammed
By Erwin Oliva
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 18:11:00 02/28/2008
Filed Under: NBN deal, Media, Technology (general), Internet
MANILA, Philippines -- The blog of Filipino journalist Ellen Tordesillas has experienced a “spam attack.”
“I got several text [messages] saying this blog was down. My administrator said it experienced unusually heavy spam attacks,” Tordesillas wrote in her blog Thursday.
Tordesillas’ blog was cited at the ongoing Senate Blue Ribbon Committee investigation because she was among those who posted the supposed affidavit of witness Dante Madriaga, a former ZTE Corp. consultant who claimed that ZTE paid $41 million in kickbacks to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, her husband and the so-called “Gang of Four.”
In a telephone interview, Tordesillas said her blog, which has about 2,000 readers, was inaccessible for more than an hour.
“I was told that I got an unusual volume of spam. Just the other day I exceeded my bandwidth,” she added.
Asked if she knew who was behind the attack, she said she does not have the slightest idea. But she pointed out that she has recently been getting more traffic due to issues she has been posting, including those related to the Senate investigation on the national broadband network project.
She said that her blog usually gets about 11,000 page views a day. Lately, the number has increased to 14,000, so she has decided to upgrade her blog’s bandwidth allocation to accommodate more visitors.
Based on some reader's comments, Tordesillas' blog was inaccessible,
with some even reporting that her account was suspended and that readers
could not post comments on her blog.
According to Ploghost president Abe Olandres, they suspended Tordesillas' blog due to the high-traffic of e-mail spam.
"It's an attack but we can't say if it's malicious because she has recently been getting more traffic," Olandres explained.
Olandres said Tordesillas' blog has recently been getting 13,000 page views a day, with most of the traffic coming from outside the Philippines.
He explained that it is possible that the recent spike in traffic and the e-mail spam attack could have caused the blog's host to bog down.
Ploghost decided to suspend Tordesillas' account to protect the other hosted blogs, which includes that of political blogger Manuel Quezon III.
Tonyo Cruz, journalist and blogger, was among the first to report the spam attack.
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