Hackers Block Sale of Colorado Rockies World Series Tickets

Baseball fans suffered an aggravating setback yesterday when the Colorado Rockies were forced to stop selling tickets for the World Series. According to the Rockies, the sale of tickets to the Major League Baseball (MLB) Championship event was closed due to a cyber attack by a hacker, or perhaps a team of hackers.

The Colorado Rockies gained the attention of baseball fans from around the world in recent weeks, when they won an amazing 21 of 22 games to sweep their way through the playoffs and into the World Series. The Rockies will be playing the Red Socks in the World Series this year, with the third, fourth and fifth games of the Series scheduled to be played at Denver's Coors Field on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

The Rockies were set to begin selling tickets to those three World Series games on Monday, but had to abruptly abort the process at noon Mountain Time. After selling just 500 tickets for the event, the Rockies web site was flooded with 8.5 Million hits, nearly simultaneously.

It would be easy for one to assume that this is good news for the Rockies and for Major League Baseball in general, but the grim reality is that most of these hits were not from human visitors. The overwhelming majority were pings or bots hitting the site from slave computers under the control of a hacker or team of hackers. The cyber attack on the ticket server is what is commonly referred to as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack, and is one of the leading forms of cyber terrorism facing those engaged in online business transactions.

"It's been an extremely frustrating morning for our fans and the entire Rockies' organization," said Keli McGregor, Rockies' team president said in a press release. "We are working diligently with Major League Baseball and Paciolan to resolve the issues impacting online ticket sales for the 2007 World Series."

Paciolan, the Southern California company that manages the ticket sales for a number of professional sports teams, has assessed the problem and assured the Rockies and Major League Baseball that it is safe to bring ticket sales back online without being concerned over an interruption in service.