There appears to be a number of website fails that have taken place so far this Month and we’re only half-way in!
One of them appears to have been the pre-sale of tickets to the popular V Festival exclusively for Virgin Media customers on 4th March.
Tickets were due to go on sale in the morning but a technical error lasted around 24 hours! This caused frustration for would-be ticket buyers who had to wait an extra day even though they had money waiting to be spent. Many of them took their frustration out on twitter as seen below:
This truly is awkward @vfestival @virginmedia pic.twitter.com/fspmQpd1n3
— Lizzie Hickton (@Lizzie_Hickton) March 4, 2015
@virginmedia @vfestival Pretty much sums it up….. pic.twitter.com/koXcq2ttft
— Alexander Catterall (@AlCatterall) March 4, 2015
Another fail was by Virgin Media – again. They forgot to renew their security certificate on their own contact page!
Image obtained at time from http://help.virginmedia.com/
They did manage to resolve this in the end but it shows how careless they were as this was caught by a regular reader of The Register so it could have been like this for a number of days. This shows that even big companies can make minor information security mistakes which can have an impact on their reputation.
Jamie Oliver’s website was also hit by a virus (for a second time!) and was dangerous for people using vulnerable browsers as malicious software had the ability to obtain login details and passwords for other sites as well as stopping security updates being installed on the machine that is being accessed. Further information for this can be found on the BBC News site.
Finally, the biggest news for this month so far was the hacking of the BBC website! This was rumoured to have been caused by Anonymous who stated in an open letter that they will perform a DDoS attack to bring down the site, but was it them?
Tweets were also made about the hacking by the BBC, and the public in a joking manner:
Apologies, as we are experiencing technical problems on the BBC News website. We are working hard to resolve the issues.
— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) March 14, 2015
Has Clarkson taken the BBC website with him?
— James Miley (@jamesmiley73) March 14, 2015
Looks like Clarkson’s hacked the #BBC website, everything is down!
— Steve Harvey (@SteveJHarvey) March 14, 2015
Users were all greeted with an 500 error message with an image of a clown in front of what appears to be a fire. However, BBC were quick to advise that this was an internal error and they hadn’t be taken down from any such hackers.
There have been a large number of conspiracies which try to insinuate that Jeremy Clarkson fans hacked the website but who knows? Or could it be the hactivists who refer to themselves as Anonymous? Who do you think it was? Leave your comments below!
Feel free to share and comment as all feedback and discussions are always welcome on my blogs! – ImranahmedIT
