Followers of EvilEsq are aware our documents were summarily banished from
scribd.com on September 5, 2008. So far, the folks at scribd have refused to provide us a cogent explanation as to why. In fact, they refuse to formally respond altogether-- no doubt on advice of counsel, whoever that may be. Of course that’s never stopped EvilEsq from unearthing the facts. While we don’t discuss our methods, based on anonymous eye-witness accounts EvilEsq has been able to piece together some of the events of Friday, September 5, 2008.
At approximately 14:40 Tijuana time, scribd.com was hit with a massive DNS or DDos attack-- accounts vary as to which. The attack knocked out the scribd.com service for approximately forty-five minutes. According to a witness, who asked to be identified only as ‘Packets’ out of fear his Facebook page might be vandalized, “it was the most powerful attack we’ve ever experienced. More powerful than the attack that followed that dolt’s posting of the nude photo of Dick Cheney on our system. Or the time somebody uploaded the engineering computations and renderings of Pamela Anderson’s boob job. It brought our cluster [a group of servers] to its knees. Choked our super-turbo-midi-smoke shifting router with hundreds of thousands of simultaneous page requests. Shortly after the attack began, I got a call from headquarters in San Francisco. They couldn’t access the site and were going nuts.”
“I called ‘Softie’ [SoftLayer Technologies]. They’re our data services provider. The dude over there said he had no idea what was going-on but would call their network infrastructure providers to see if they had a clue. Well about ten minutes later I got a call back. The Softie guy said he’d called two of their network partners. The first told him their network showed no signs of abnormal traffic. The other, Savvis, told him he’d just returned from a cigarette break and didn’t know if anything was wrong but would look into it and call him back. The Sofite dude said he agreed it was the strongest attacked he’d ever witnessed. Said there was no way they could have fully mitigated it on their end. It was surreal-- bro. Had to be institutional—the NSA or another of the Bush Administration’s lackeys. Not even the best Russian hacks could have mounted such a vigorous assault,” Packets exalted.
“I tried to call headquarters back but their phones were busy. I tried my boss’ mobile phone. No answer. I thought World War Three had broken out, said the twenty-something, seven-foot-two inch man with a body resembling an Erector set. It was epic,” he boomed, his bloodshot eyes bulging as he articulated his neck to within three inches this reporter’s nose. “When the attack ended, I bailed. That’s all I know. Nobody at HQ will talk to me about it.”
While EvilEsq has not been able to independently confirm Packet’s recitation of events, we have gathered reports from another witness on the scene at Scribd’s San Francisco headquarters. “At about the same time as the attack occurred on our system last Friday, a gaggle of more than twenty men and women, each pulling a trolley loaded with large black briefcases, showed up at our offices,” a slender elderly woman recounted. “They were dressed impeccably. All of the men wore the same lavender ties and the women lavender blouses. Their nails were nicely manicured, hair perfectly coiffed-- as if they’d just visited the salon. The combination of their perfume was asphyxiating. They smelled like a roving brothel.”
The leader, a tall lanky man of about forty with white hair, pewter skin and a doubling chin haughtily introduced himself as Mister Hatch and demanded to see our CEO—Trip Adler. Hatch’s accent was defiantly English. London I’d guess. Our receptionist, asked if they had an appointment. He sneered at her and said that he didn’t need an appointment-- only he used a curse word. The receptionist, picked up the phone and dialed Trip’s extension. Her hands were shaking so much she had to dial his extension three times, the poor dear. That Hatch man was extremely rude! Trip came right out. Hatch immediately lashed into him, telling him there were documents on the scribd.com system he wanted removed and that if he didn’t they were going to sue. These are my lawyers he said, swinging his right arm in a broad arc as if he was introducing the cast of a play.
Trip was very professional. He asked Hatch to calm down and suggested they move to the conference room. For a young man he’s remarkably poised. The lawyers packed into our conference room, it’s rather small but they seemed not to mind. They were in there for about ten minutes, with the door open. The whole office could hear. Hatch dominated the conversation waxing on about the fact that his wife was a Heller Ehrman Partner, that he was a banker, his ex-wife’s family owns a home next door to the Bush’s compound in Florida, blah blah blah. It was obvious he had no substantive reason to remove the material in question from our site. They were just trying to intimidate us—‘bullshit and bravado,’ my husband would say, God rest his sole.”
“Trip wasn’t impressed. He reached into his pocket for his autographed copy of the First Amendment— he always carries that with him. Suddenly, one of the female lawyers, a tall willowy woman with blonde hair cropped just below her ears— shot him with one of those Taser guns the cops use. Trip fell to the ground, and was paralyzed until she released the trigger on the Taser. Then the tall willowy bitch asked if he’d changed his mind. Trip said ‘no’ and she zapped him again. Jason, our ‘community guy’ here at scribd— he’s friends with Barack Obama on our system-- rushed over and pulled the wires from the Taser gun off Trip.”
“After a couple minutes, Trip stood up and addressed Hatch, informing him that if he wanted the documents removed from our servers, they’d have to file a complaint—‘pursuant to the terms on our website like everybody else.’ Then he told them to leave.”
“Hatch and one of the lawyers, a heavyset man with abnormally short legs, a sparse comb-over and the face of a homunculus, stormed out of our offices and down the stairs of our building. From where I sit on the second floor, I could see them down on the street talking on their cell phones. At about the same time, Trip received a call from one of our investors, Redpoint Ventures I think. He took the call in the reception area so I overheard his side of the conversation. He didn’t seem to know the caller so I don’t think it was the partner who usually deals with us. After a few minutes he started saying “yes sir” and “no sir” then hung up the phone without saying goodbye. Trip was fuming. His face was beat red. I’ve never seen him so angry. He walked back in his office and slammed the door—that’s when I left to go to my knitting club meeting. When I came in on Monday, nobody seemed to know what was going on. We checked our site. The documents had been removed. That’s all I know.”
EvilEsq has learned that the attack on Scribd’s servers was not an isolated event. At least three other similar attacks have occurred over the past couple years to servers hosting content linking Seamus Hatch, Marcia Hatch and Heller Ehrman to nefarious activities. The attacks were so strong that none of the webhosts, GoDaddy.com, Dreamhost.com and Hosting Panama could mitigate the damage. According to sources at Dreamhost and Hosting Panama the attacks wrought significant damage causing many of their hosting client’s sites to be offline for extended periods—days in many cases. Some clients even moved their sites to other hosting providers as a consequence of the attacks.
One tipster related that his firm hired a “cyber dick” to find the source of these massive attacks. In the process of their investigation, they determined the attacks coincided with visits to the sites by someone using IP addresses belonging to
Savvis (NASDAQ: SVVS), a global Internet services company providing hosting and network services to major corporations and governments. Our source cautioned that this evidence is not conclusive because it’s theoretically possible to ‘spoof’ a server into logging the IP address of a terminal different than the terminal that actually visited the site. Though, he pointed out, that ‘IP (address) spoofing’ would require significant technical capabilities that could not easily be accomplished with commercially available software.
While it’s possible the visits by terminals using Savvis IP addresses at the time of the attacks are either coincidental or perhaps ‘spoofed,’ EvilEsq has learned that
Richard S. Warley, a Savvis Managing Director is married to Seamus Hatch’s eldest sister, Sarah. It remains an open question whether Savvis was in any way involved in the cyber attacks. That said, they certainly have the capability accomplish such a feat either directly or using surrogates.
According to Heller Ehrman’s website, Larry Weeks, who joined Heller Ehrman’s Venture Law Practice Group in 2005, counts Redpoint Ventures as one of his clients. Heller Ehrman, Venture Law Group Associate, Blake Ilstrup alleges in his Heller Ehrman biography that he’s worked with Redpoint Ventures in some capacity. Redpoint, is Scribd’s most prominent venture capital backer having provided the early stage company $3.5 million of first stage venture financing in the Spring 2007. And it’s highly likely Scribd will require incremental funding soon. Conceivably this could make the company susceptible to influence by either Heller Ehrman or Redpoint to remove our documents from their system. Certainly the folks at Redpoint are intelligent enough to understand that such a tactic would compromise Scribd’s position as a neutral player in the Internet document hosting and delivery sphere—bringing with it negative publicity. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense they’d collude with Heller Ehrman, Marcia Bruggeman Hatch (a Heller Ehrman Shareholder) or Seamus Hatch of Aran Strategic Finance to pressure Scribd’s scribds to effect the removal of our documents. Then again Heller Ehrman Et and Al are known to use all available means to silence those critical of their illegal, unethical and immoral practices.
EvilEsq intends to continue to cover this story as it develops. Any information provided by third parties will of course be treated in confidence.
