"Since yesterday, we have been under attack by a malicious bot net. More than 1,000 IPs constantly flooded our data lines. For events of this size, we employ two redundant firewalls for our 100 MBit hard line by the German Telekom.

While our firewalls were able to block the incoming packets, the sheer amount of packet flood completely filled up the internet connection leading to our hall. You can see this on the attached graphs showing when the attacks happened today and their ferocity. This made it impossible to log on to the online parts of World of Warcraft, Counter-Strike and Quake Live, causing both drops and lags, and thus a tremendous amount of delay.

Unfortunately, just like on the streets, you can never be completely safe from criminals seeking to disturb and profit off of the general public. Still, we are constantly working on countering all attacks together with Deutsche Telekom and CeBIT organizer Deutsche Messe AG. Now, late on Wednesday we have been successful, so that World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike 1.6 are back on track and Quake Live play can be resumed tomorrow.

Make no mistake: Making the tournament run smoothly and ensuring a consistent, high-quality coverage is our highest priority."