[Eril-l] American Chemical Society blocked IPs

[Mark Hemhauser]

We’ve had three or four reports of excessive downloading of ACS articles
last week. One was a legitimate user who will stop collecting interesting
articles beyond what can reasonably be read. The article count on that one
wasn’t all that high and the articles were in fact on a related topic. I
thought the “unreasonableness” of that session was debatable and said as
much. The other’s accounts were hacked.



We have worked out a solution when the proxy gets blocked of using our
InCommon Federation Shibboleth setup. These were through the VPN, though. I
don’t know who set it up, but we have that Shibboleth method in place for
many major publishers and it is now promoted as a solution when the proxy
gets cut off, and even when one user is experiencing access problems via an
office IP.



Mark



Mark Hemhauser

​Head of Acquisitions, The Library

250 Moffitt Library, MC 6000

University of California, Berkeley

Berkeley, CA 94720-6000



510-664-4310



*From:* Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] *On Behalf Of *
Egan,Noelle
*Sent:* Tuesday, June 07, 2016 1:19 PM
*To:* eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
*Subject:* [Eril-l] American Chemical Society blocked IPs



Hi All,



Here at Drexel we had a hack of 4 users account on Sunday, and the accounts
were used to download massive numbers of articles from ACS.  ACS
subsequently blocked our access through our EZProxy IP address.



I just got off the phone with Richard at ACS about this, who let me know
that many universities had user accounts hacked in the same way, and this
breach was affecting several other publishers as well.   I was surprised I
hadn’t seen any traffic about the issue on this listserv – has anyone else
been blocked by ACS or another publisher in the last few days for excessive
downloading?



FYI – ACS says they are not unblocking any IP addresses until they have the
issue resolved, at which time they’ll email all their affected customers
about reinstated access.



Thanks, Noelle



*-------------------------------------------------------------------*


*Noelle Egan**eResources & Acquisitions Librarian*

Drexel University Libraries

*Drexel University*3300 Market Street
W. W. Hagerty Library
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Tel: 215.895.2752  |  Fax: 215.895.2070
drexel.edu/library <http://www.library.drexel.edu/>
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