The Cyber Attack at Lausanne World Congress

Here's the skinny. The bandwidth and internet access problems that have plagued the Lausanne World Congress in Cape Town over the past few days were the result of a malicious virus from a phone brought into the Cape Town International Convention Center. According to unofficial reports, millions of hits from 66 different sites eventually crashed the system.

Which country? Well, one of my strongest theories was that the New Zealand Government was upset at their small representation and were getting back at Lausanne. But now we have heard that 95% of these internet hits came from the country of China, and the 66 locations were also situated in China, and that account of a Chinese fellow taking photos of Congress participants before running away, and this has caused us to consider China at least as a potentially suspicious candidate. And so . . . after weighing the possibities,  well . . . I still think it was New Zealand those cheeky beggers!

Now heres the scoop. Our problems were solved by two Indian cousins from Bangalore who were here as volunteers in the IT department. They came to connect printers and ended up stopping viruses. In fact, they have already solved the problem and we are back on track.

Shout out to our two geeky heros: Unisys Global Services employee Vijay Kumar and Pastor Daniel Singh who has just got figured out why he got a doctorate in computational biology.

Vijay-kumar-and-daniel-singh-460

I took this photo a few minutes ago of Vijay (left) and Daniel (right) during Tim Keller's talk on global cities. Sorry for the flash, Tim.

Offical press release from Lausanne here. Many unoffical releases, like this one, are all over the net. Check out Note on Lausanne live blog at Outreach Mag for a fuller post on this event.

Andrew

Andrew Jones launched his first internet space in 1997 and has been teaching on related issues for the past 20 years. He travels all the time but lives between Wellington, San Francisco and a hobbit home in Prague.

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