CloudNine Communications

» see cloudnine.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

At 7:45 on the morning of Tuesday 22 January 2002, the directors of a small internet provider in Basingstoke decided to switch off their own network. They posted the announcement to ISPReview, where their customers had already spent four days reading about the attack. "We tried overnight to bring our web servers back online but were seeing denial of service attacks against all our key servers, including email and DNS," it said. "We felt we had a moral duty not to expose our customers to possible attacks as well."

Cloud Nine Communications had been selling internet access and hosting since April 1996, and ISPReview had named it ISP of the Year in 2000. It was not a failing business when it stopped. The closure notice says so in as many words: the company was solvent, and an administrator would only be appointed if the assets could not be sold quickly. Emeric Miszti, the chief executive, told The Register that the firewall had gone first to a brute-force attack on its password, and that what came after hit the mail and name servers together.

Insurance is what settled it. Cloud Nine carried disaster cover and Miszti said it would not fund a rebuild, which meant staying dark for however long the work took, with no money coming in and the attacker still unidentified. BT had been helping trace the traffic for weeks without finding a source. Two days after the shutdown, Zetnet, a business provider based in Shetland, confirmed it had taken over the customer contracts.

~ the case file ~

~ the seven days ~

The first public notice went up on the Friday, 18 January, in a message to ISPReview that described the firewall being hashed and destroyed. By the following Tuesday every server that mattered was being hit at once. "This is terrorism, pure and simple," Miszti told The Register that day. "I never want to relive the last seven days again. We still don't know who's behind it, nor do we know who's next."

No arrest was ever reported and no motive was ever established. A Register follow-up on 30 January noted that both questions were still open, and nothing has closed them since. Whoever did it took down a British company and its customers, and is still anonymous twenty-four years later.

~ the customers, and a mobile number ~

The announcement ended with an appeal to other providers to take the business over, and it printed a director's mobile number to call. That is what a small company's collapse looked like in 2002, with no press office anywhere in it and a phone in somebody's pocket instead. Staff were paid to the end of the month. Zetnet moved roughly 2,500 customers across from 24 January, and on the ISPReview forums the gratitude and the fury ran side by side, mostly from people who had spent a week not knowing whether their mail still existed.

In January 2002 I was dialing TTNet from a house in Turkey and spending most of the rest of my evenings in an internet cafe. A Basingstoke provider with a few thousand accounts was never going to reach that. What does carry over is the shape of the dependency. One company's machines held your mail, and when those machines stopped there was no second copy of it anywhere.

~ the number that does not match ~

Wikipedia credits Cloud Nine with over 30,000 business customers. The contemporaneous reporting does not support it: both The Register and Wired put the transferred base at about 2,500, and an Associated Press piece two weeks later said 2,400. The smaller number is the one written by people on the phone to the company that week, so it is the one in the stats above. The larger figure may be counting mailboxes, or it may be counting nothing at all.

The ISP of the Year award in the stats comes from the same Wikipedia article and has no second source behind it either. Everything else on this page is from reporting filed in the week it happened.

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