Equibase website back to almost 100 percent following attacks

Equibase, the industry’s racing and breeding database, has restored its website’s capabilities to nearly 100 percent following attacks that began last late week that shut down some of the site’s services, according to company officials.

The attacks, which began on Thursday, disabled the site’s statistical section, which includes leaderboards and profile pages for horses, jockeys, owners, and trainers, according to the company. In a statement, the company attributed the problems to “a high volume of malicious activity.”

Jason Wilson, the president of Equibase, said on Wednesday morning that Equibase employees continue to conduct a forensic examination of the attack’s purpose and origin, but he said that the activity did not appear to have the hallmarks of a distributed denial of service, which is a popular tactic used to disable websites.

“It was certainly some bot behavior,” Wilson said. “We started noticing on Thursday that there was a high level of unusual activity that was circumventing our anti-bot controls. By Saturday, it had quickly and perniciously taken down parts of the site.”

Equibase makes some of its data available for free, but the site uses a variety of controls to prevent activities that could be used to scrape the site for large-scale amounts of data that could be used to form products that compete with its own race- and breeding-related products and those of its paying customers. Daily Racing Form, among other commercial past-performance retailers, buys its data from Equibase.

Wilson said that an initial investigation of the activity led the company’s officials to believe that the bot activity intended to scrape data from the site, but he said that the investigation was not complete.

“Our working assumption is that it was just someone scraping, nothing more than that,” Wilson said. “It was definitely a violation of our terms of service for the site.”

Wilson said that Equibase has not yet decided if the company will notify law-enforcement agencies of the activity.