DENVER -- The Colorado Rockies tried again Tuesday to sell nearly 60,000 World Series tickets online, one day after their first attempt collapsed in a computer-system crash the team blamed on an "external, malicious attack."
"It's going through at this point," Rockies spokesman Jay Alves said about 30 minutes after Tuesday's sale started. "We're very confident that we'll have these tickets sold today."
Alves said tickets were selling at a rate of 1,500 per minute. Games 3 and 4, on Saturday and Sunday, sold out within 2½ hours.
On Monday, the Rockies were forced to stop the online-only sale of tickets after about two hours after 8.5 million hits overwhelmed the servers set up to take the orders. The Rockies later said they were victims of an attack. Neither the team nor the company hired to run the sale, Irvine, Calif.-based Paciolan Inc., have offered any specifics about what happened.
Dave Marcus of McAfee Avert Labs, the research arm of antivirus software maker McAfee Inc., said Paciolan could have been the target of a "denial-of-service" attack Monday.
Under that scenario, attacking computers overwhelm Web servers with repeated but false requests to connect. When the Web server signals the attacking computer to proceed, the attacker doesn't respond, tying up the server.
"In a certain kind of denial-of-service attack, you never complete that handshake," Marcus said.
Sometimes hackers launch denial-of-service attacks to be a nuisance or to make a point, but in some cases they are used to disable a competitor, he said.
Alves said he was unaware of any criminal investigation into what happened Monday. The FBI did not immediately return a call from The Associated Press.
Across the street from Coors Field, Eduardo Casias sat on the back of a car working on two laptop computers, trying to buy tickets over the stadium's wireless Internet connection. His friend, Josh Bentley, was waiting outside the Coors Field ticket window in case the Rockies reversed themselves and began offering in-person sales.
Bentley said the online sale was unfair to local fans because it gave out-of-town buyers an equal chance at the tickets.
"They wanted to broaden it and get the whole world involved, and there's probably people in Tokyo who are the only ones getting tickets," he said.
Jerry McMorris a co-founder of the Rockies who sold his remaining interest in the team in 2005, stopped by the stadium ticket window to pick up tickets for three games for himself and his family.
"There obviously have been technical problems [with ticket sales]. Paciolan has been a very good supplier for the Rockies and Major League Baseball," McMorris said before leaving with a packet of tickets in his pocket.
Some would-be ticket buyers got computer-screen messages on Tuesday saying the Web site was experiencing heavy loads and were asked to wait for the server to become available, the same messages many fans got yesterday.
There were small differences visible: The page counted down two minutes before automatically refreshing, and users were told not to refresh the page themselves. On Monday, the countdown was a minute, and there was no warning against manually refreshing.
The Rockies said fewer than 500 tickets were sold Monday before the sale was shut down. All those tickets will be honored, the team said.
The Rockies originally planned to sell tickets at Coors Field and the team's Dugout Stores in the Denver area as well as online. They announced Wednesday all sales would be online, saying that would be more fair.
The Series opens in Boston with games on Wednesday and Thursday. Games 3 and 4 will be on Saturday and Sunday in Denver. If there is a Game 5, it will be played Monday in Denver.
The Red Sox held a random online drawing for the right to buy tickets to Fenway Park games, said Ron Bumgarner, vice president of ticketing. The Oct. 15 drawing attracted more than 350,000 fans; the winners bought tickets at a private sale.
The team also had a telephone sale for fans without computer access, Bumgarner said.
A limited number of tickets will also go on sale at Fenway Park on game day, with fans allowed to line up five hours before game time.
Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press
Source: ESPN.com
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