Posters at the Christian Boylove Forum (CBF) lost an important means of communication and support for three months after CBF was taken offline by its internet service provider on March 17, as a result of distributed denial-of-service attacks. 

As is typical in such attacks, computer hackers worked their way into over 100 machines in Europe, North America, and Australia, and used them to launch the attack on CBF. The attacks consisted of thousands of "ping" requests which overwhelmed the CBF server. After several days of attacks, CBF's internet service provider decided to terminate the service contract.

It is not known whether the attackers were vigilantes trying to close down "pedophile sites" or simply malicious hackers.  Tracking down the originators of such denial-of-service attacks is prohibitively time consuming and expensive.

It took approximately one month for CBF's system administrators to get the discussion board up and running again with a new service provider and a new URL.  However, after eight days, an upstream provider (a company that provides the internet connection for CBF's provider), concerned about the controversial nature of CBF's content, disconnected it again.

At the time this issue of Paraklesis went to press, the system administrators were going online with a new provider, one of the main internet backbone companies, which should ensure future stability. The URL is www.cblf.org.