Ivo Gorinov

By any definition Ivo Gorinov is fairly successful businessman.As president of Six.Net, an Internet service provider, Web-site design and network-consulting firm, he heads a staff of eight, with offices in the heart of downtown, and a host of quality accounts.

But Gorinov looks like any other Six.Net employee, and if you walk through the company's offices, it's pretty hard to tell that he is the boss.That's because Gorinov eschews the traditional badge of corporate success and power: the business suit and tie.

"I like to dress up," said Gorinov."But when you are working long hours, you want to be comfortable.So we all dress fairly casually here."

Gorinov is not alone.
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"Sometimes it's just a matter of courtesy," Gorinov said."You dress the way people expect you to dress."

Photo caption: Ivo Gorinov, president of Six.Net, an Internet service provider wears a suit when he goes to meet his banker, or big corporate clients.The rest of the time he dresses casually.

Diekmeyer can be reached at peter@peterdiekmeyer.com

Ivo Gorinov understands what the folks at Yahoo! Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. are going through.Last May, his company network was brought down for 12 hours by attacks similar to those suffered by the three U.S. E-commerce giants last week.

"I was on vacation in Morocco and found out about the attack on my daily call to the office before heading down to the beach," said Gorinov, a computer consultant and president of Six.net, an Internet service provider.

Beach plans were cut short when Gorinov's technician told him 250 Six.net dial-up users were unable to access browsing and E-mail services and traffic was blocked to the 50 corporate Web-sites hosted on his server.

"I was under tremendous pressure ­- thousands of miles away from home and my entire network down, said Gorinov in his Bulgarian accented English.
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"I made some inquiries, and it turned out to be a client's son, who was using the corporate connection to browse the Web, said Gorinov, who runs Six.net with his wife and a support technician."He was apparently mouthing off in chat rooms and making enemies on-line."

Although Gorinov wasn't initially worried about what he saw as childish pranks, one day he received an ominous E-mail warning."The anonymous note, was written by someone who knew a lot about my client's son, his name, address, description and place of employment."

The gist of the note was that Six.net's client was upsetting some powerful players on the Net and that his account should be cut off.

Cutting off a person's Web access is a touchy issue that goes beyond a business decision ­ there are freedom of speech implications as well.Gorinov took the middle road ­ he warned the client about his son's activities, and, after cutting him off briefly, made an agreement whereby access would be restored if the son would agree to stay out of chat rooms.

The attack came two weeks later.Like ones made against the high profile U.S. sites and more recently HMV Canada Inc., it consisted of millions of requests for information directed at Gorinov's client's account.The requests -- launched from a multitude of servers hijacked specifically for that purpose -- quickly jammed Six.net's entire network.

Fixing the problem from Gorinov's Morocco hotel proved to be quite a challenge.By working though a terminal in an Internet café and running up a huge long-distance phone bill with his technician, Gorinov was able to set up a temporary solution that got most of network up and running again.

But the real detective work would have to wait until he got back to Canada. "We finally traced most of the attacks as having come from servers in Japan," said Gorinov."It was not their fault ­ hackers are constantly scanning the Net for servers with security holes in them, and lists are routinely exchanged and posted at hacker sites."

According to Gorinov, almost any server can be appropriated by hackers to launch these "request for service" attacks.
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But according to Gorinov it's important not to over emphasise the threat."Although the attacks being publicised are deemed to be the work of "hackers", the culprits did not gain access to any company data ­ they merely temporarily brought down the systems."The recent actions would probably be better described as vandalism attacks since the word hacker traditionally implies system penetration.

"The attacks are annoying and can cause a great deal of inconvenience.But in a way it's a good thing that we are patching up the security holes now, while the Net is still in a growth stage," said Gorinov.

- Ivo Gorinov, President of Six Dot Net.
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Ivo GorinovPresident(514) 369-4755E-mail : ivo@six.net