The problem is that the response to the link he provided cannot handle the traffic ( I offered Chiefdelphi.com next year).
Hi! This is a random person named Jackie Moore. I serve as the FIRST Senior Mentor for Illinois. I am working with Steve Cremer to try to recognize the many wonderful mentors who work tirelessly with the students on FIRST teams, but are often overlooked in the big picture. I apologize in advance for the length of this post.
Let me start by replacing some mis-information with facts.
The URL to the web page in question was communicated ONLY to primary contacts of teams officially registered to attend the Championship. It was not publicly shared anywhere else (other than by the person who posted it on Chief Delphi). The page requested (NOT required) ONE phone number - that of the person completing the form - to be used only if there were questions about the names supplied. There was (by design) no request for contact information for any of the mentors.
The only way anyone could access the resulting data would be to hack into the site and hack into the database. A successful hack would generate only a list of names. There was no way this information could be harmful to anyone. In fact, the delay in getting the email out was in some ways linked to the desire to be as careful as possible about protecting the privacy of the mentors we wanted to honor. (We also couldn’t contact all teams until all teams were identified after the 5th week events) There never was a ‘public listing of mentor names and phone numbers’ nor was that data ever contained in the resultant database. Anyone who has such a list obtained it illegally from some other source.
To collect the names of the mentors to be recognized, I obtained the services of a student at IIT (that would be the Illinois Institute of Technology reference ‘uncovered’ by the person looking for the source of the presumed hoax). This student’s willingness to help is consistent with the great mentor support we in Chicago have enjoyed from IIT. In fact, last year, IIT’s Office of the President underwrote our local Mentor Recognition Event. This is in addition to the financial support IIT provides the Midwest Regional Event and the great support they give local teams. The particular student helping us on this effort happens to have a global business providing internet services.
I am extremely disappointed and personally offended that the fact that this student is from India intensified the belief that the site was a hoax. The alleged search for the truth, readily revealed the truth (company name, site owner, etc), but it wasn’t seen as truth because the search was really for proof of a hoax. Would the same conclusion have been drawn if the domain name sounded more “American” or if the site owner’s name had been Johnson? Afterall, the approach taken by this web developer is similar to many big name companies who host sites for their clients.
For his willingness to serve, this student’s server suffered a denial of service attack which sadly seems to have originated from within the FIRST community. The center letter of FIRST stands for RECOGNITION and should be secondary only to Inspiration. Why then, is it so hard to believe that someone truly wanted to recognize mentors?
For those questioning why the URL was used to gather the information, please be aware that while some of you are fortunate to have a Senior Mentor in your area, most teams do not. While some Senior Mentors offered to help by supplying names, if we only collected the names of the teams being served by the 20 Senior Mentors, we would miss more than half of the mentors at the Championship. Relying on email only, meant that someone would have had to manually enter what could easily be 3,000 names, resulting in 3,000 opportunities to introduce an error. If each team’s main contact entered the names, we would then have fewer opportunities for error, and a more manageable process for completing our recognition plans.
Unfortunately, someone decided they did not like that approach and deliberately trashed the database. This occurred sometime between the midnight posts proclaiming the site was a hoax and therefore should be shut down, and 9:00am. As a result, Steve Cremer has been frantically entering names for the past few days so we can be ready for the Championship. In addition, an entrepreneur and supporter of FIRST has become the victom of a hacker. The destructive action against the IIT student’s server and database is not being taken lightly. We are activley pursuing the identity of the hacker and appropriate action will be taken.
I truly appreciate the offer of Chief Delphi to host such an application next year, but the problem was not one of bandwidth. The problem was the direct result of malicious activity. Once we determine WHY the site was targeted, we can then begin planning how to better capture the data we need to recognize what I consider to be FIRST’s most valuable resource - the team mentors. In the meantime, I hope any teams whose mentors are present and do NOT get recognized at the Championship understand that this is not intentional. I, along with the other Senior Mentors, look forward to personally meeting and thanking as many of you as possible at the Championship.
