Some quotes from the official MIT report: http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pdf http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-presiden

Some quotes from the official MIT report: http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pdf http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pd... Typically, when an excessive use case is reported that is determined to originate from within MIT’s network, the Libraries report this to either the MIT Information Services and Technology (IS&T) network security team or MIT’s “Stopit” group, which deals with inappropriate behavior that occurs electronically. The Stopit group’s general response is to send the offender a warning email message. This is almost always all that is needed to get people’s attention and have them stop whatever it was they were doing that caused the problem. [...] This time, the requests and downloads stimulated a cascade of failures that brought down multiple JSTOR servers. Half the servers in one data center failed, and JSTOR engineers feared that the entire service might go down worldwide. [...] Also on October 12, the Director of the MIT Libraries reported to MIT’s Academic Council that a cyber-attack of the JSTOR database had caused a weekend shutdown of JSTOR to the entire campus. Now take a look at the "MIT Hacker Ethic", particularly bulletpoint #2: http://hacks.mit.edu/misc/ethics.html http://hacks.mit.edu/misc/ethics.html