Hi and welcome to Cyber reasons malicious life. I'm Ran Levy. Grand Living. J-store is a digital library of academic journals, books and primary sources.

On Saturday, September 25, 2010, J-store's IT people noticed a massive increase in article downloads.

It seems someone was scraping the website, programmatically scanning the website page by page,

downloading hundreds of papers per minute. Such scraping can be very taxing

on services servers, which is why it's forbidden by J-store's Terms of Service.

The offending IP, which belonged to MIT's network, was subsequently located and blocked within

hours.

When J-store's admins got to work the following morning, they noticed that the scraping continued,

but from a different MIT IP address.

They contacted the university, but MIT's tech people weren't much help because MIT provides free

access to J-store to all of its visiting scholars. The culprit just had to sign in as a guest.

As it turns out, they did. They signed in as Gary Host, Ghost for short.

So J-store decided that this time they would block a whole section of IPs on campus and that

would take care of the problem.

All was well for a while and so after some time J-Stor restored MIT's full axis.

It was on Saturday two weeks later when the scraping started again at an even faster rate.

This is when J-store shut down access to the entire MIT campus.

By this time, they calculated that approximately 450,000 articles have been downloaded.

No one knew where they'd gone.

As far as anyone could tell, they were not sold or republished someplace else.

Gary Host did not respond to J-store's inquiries.

Both MIT and J-store agreed that for the time being,

...