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Anti-racism sites hit by wave of cyber-attacks
- cochne 6y agoOriginal publication by Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cyberattacks-since-the-murder-of-george-floyd/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cyberattacks-since-the-murder-of...
- newacct583 6y ago> Nearly six years ago, Cloudflare founded Project Galileo because we noticed a disturbing trend of disproportionate attacks against at-risk organizations and individuals that were advocating for marginalized groups. Project Galileo was set up to provide protection from cyberattacks for vulnerable targets, like artistic groups, humanitarian organizations, and the voices of political dissent. I had no idea that existed. But I'm pleased it does.
- rapsey 6y agoWe are really seing the chickens comming home to roost with regards to globalisation politics of the last few decades. When the wealth growth only happens in the top few percent this is inevitable.
- AlexandrB 6y agoThis comment is wholly unclear. What's inevitable? Cyberattacks? Racism? Protests? Police violence?
- rapsey 6y agoYes
- arel 6y agoGlobalisation has many problems but _causes_ racism? I would argue it's demagogues who take advantage of societal breakdown to inflame inherent racism. More generally we also have a choice regardless of circumstances to not be racist. I can see how as a species we're not there yet though.
- 0-O-0 6y agoI believe that argument here is that globalisation causes a bunch of interactions that wouldn't have happened otherwise, that leads to strife ("they took our jobs" is one of the plethora of scenarios) and that leads to racism.
- spsphulse 6y agoGood ol Reddit Yes-sir-oo.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- scoutt 6y agoWhile in "in the last few decades" you could dream about owning a computer, today you have a supercomputer in your pocket that you can use to complain about the remainder of unresolved issues of our imperfect human society. And we are reading your messages from all the continents in the world. Think! before talking about "globalization" as inherently "bad".
- ginko 6y agoI'm not agreeing with OP, but I don't find the "but there's iphones now" argument all that convincing. Having a gadget when you can barely afford rent or medical care is a small comfort.
- scoutt 6y agoPhones is just one example. I didn't wanted to write "... including, but not limiting to, ...". But I am sure you knew when you read it. Still being billed for an universal human right (as health) is a problem, but you can use your phone to call an ambulance wherever you are.
- zozbot234 6y agoAnti-racism sites are being knocked offline... and some people still think that white nationalists and nazi's are completely uninvolved in the street violence we've been seeing. Yeah right. This is Anonymous/4chan M.O., and it and "Antifa" are fake labels which white nationalists are using to cloak their violent plans.
- Softcadbury 6y agoSome people (countries?) just want chaos
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AlexandrB 6y agoNot just them, but also more recent stuff like the boogaloo movement[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement Edit: RE: Antifa as a "fake label". This might be true in specific cases, but there's an actual anti-fascist movement happening as well.
- lowdose 6y agoSounds like this group is developing it self along the line of /r/thedonald. Starts as a satire and slowly it shift to attracting more and more people with extremist views that replace the sarcastic group members.
- dec0dedab0de 6y agoI would be curious to see how they differentiate between a DDoS and a sudden influx of traffic from new sources, possibly including sources hiding behind tor/vpns/whatever. To be clear, I'm sure Cloudflare is pretty good at determining what is an attack and what is not, I'm just interested in the technical details.
- christophilus 6y agoSame. I'm sure they're seeing a lot of traffic just out of support, curiosity, etc. Definitely would be interesting to know how they distinguish that from an attack.
- chooseaname 6y agoDDoS attacks need infected computers (and I'm not sure those would be hiding anywhere), so I would imagine that the logs from one DDoS attack would have a lot of the same IP entries as other DDoS attacks.
- nicmccool 6y agoI'm sure they could differentiate the hug of death due to sudden popularity vs the continued onslaught of scripted bots just by frequency of requests, right? As in, single IP frequency of pings measured out across a batch of addresses. Those malicious would be more regimented with short recycle times, while those unmalicious would be browsing making their repeated calls erratic. (Honest question, I'm genuinely curious.)
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI feel bad for Cloudflare saying this, but I really think this shows we need to democratize DDoS protection. It's become essentially mandatory if you're running a site which might face controversy, and in the long term I'm not sure we can rely on the continued goodwill of a handful of companies to make sure it's widely available.
- jedieaston 6y agoWhat does that actually mean in practice? Government subsidized compute doesn't seem like something I'd trust all that much in practice (seems like it'd be ripe for censorship). So it'd have to be decentralized. If only IPFS was ready for prime time....
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI really don't know what it means in practice. I don't have a silver bullet in mind.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 015UUZn8aEvW 6y agoAgreed. Carrying out a DDos attack is illegal, so these services are protecting sites against illegal activity. If we want to uphold the rule of law, protecting against illegal activity should be acceptable regardless of the contents of a website. A physical comparison would be a security system for a business's property. The security company shouldn't be able to disable the system for a company simply because they don't like the politics of the people operating it. Doing that would essentially be facilitating a crime.
- OctaviusGaeus 6y agoThis gives me hope knowing there are people out there stomping out these fake narratives. The only racism I’ve experienced in my life has been over the past ten years and always from left-leaning individuals.
- greenpresident 6y agoI am happy that you have not experienced this kind of adversity in your personal life. There is no reason, however, why your personal experience should be generalised to the population/world. >stomping out these fake narratives. Why is it desirable to temporarily take some website down instead of presenting a strong and coherent counter argument.
- krapp 6y agoDon't feed the trolls. This is coming from a ten minute old green account.
- eropple 6y agoIn addition to green usernames, a pretty common tell is the "Latin"(-ish) username. The white supremacist segment of the population loves it some Rome. It is by no means indicative, but over time, if you pay attention, you end up with a bunch of heuristics that can help you identify good-faith arguments versus malicious ones.
- krapp 6y agoUsernames ending in 88 is another one. Or maybe those are all really just Dallas Cowboys fans.
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y agoThe really funny bit with the 88 == HH bit is that it's taking Gematria values of the German alphabet and assigning significance to the resulting number. IE a Jewish technique (from the Zohar & Hebrew numeral system) of converting letters into numbers. I suppose IIXIIX is too long.
- belorn 6y agoI would like to see an estimate in how much a person paid in the black market to buy access to the botnets that did this. $5? $50? $100? What is the going rate for 110k requests per seconds?
- 5040 6y agohttps://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/08/stress-testing-the-booter-services-financially/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/08/stress-testing-the-boote... This article is 5 years old now, but may give a rough idea. Like other booter services, Asylum, Lizard Stresser and VDO rely on a subscription model, where customers or subscribers can launch an unlimited number of attacks that have a duration typically ranging from 30 seconds to 1-3 hours and are limited to 1-4 concurrent attacks depending on the tier of subscription purchased. The price for a subscription normally ranges from $10-$300 USD per a month depending on the duration and number of concurrent attacks provided.
- bArray 6y agoI'm not sure, but it doesn't sound like much shared among all of them (assuming a good number have popped up). I think many people here regularly deal with those sorts of numbers in legitimate traffic. > One single website belonging to an unnamed advocacy group > dealt with 20,000 requests a second. 20k requests per second doesn't sound crazy to re-produce. Assuming you only need a 100 byte TCP packet to make a request [1], that's 800 bits. Bump up to 2000 bits assuming some overheads from somewhere, a 100Mb/s internet connection could send 50k requests a second. Seems like a single person with a decent internet connection could flood them with 20k request per second. If the attacker picks a page that requests database access or a large payload return, you could easily sink a small web server. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14526139/what-is-the-minimum-packet-size-for-tcp-over-ipv4 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14526139/what-is-the-min...
- tarkin2 6y agoHow much do foreign actors help? There are, of course, US groups that want to attack these sites. But bigger pocketed foreign actors will want, it's suggested, to spread division and mayhem to keep the US occupied. That is, the Aleksandr Dugin's 'foundations of geopolitics' strategy regarding the US: support both sides to divide the country thereby keeping the state too occupied to command itself elsewhere. Now our media, societies and communities are online this becomes possible, much more so than before, to those outside the geographical borders of a country. The democratisation of the media, virtual communities and targeted-advertising attacks the weakness of democracy: mass emotional manipulation to turn democratic choices into unmanagementable tribal warfare that ends in a totalitarian state.
- blueatlas 6y agoIs the assumption here that racist groups are the source of the DDoS attacks? Might be interesting to know where the majority of the attacks originate. I wonder if the attacks are nation sponsored. Adversaries of the U.S. like to see it on its knees these days, and injecting more FUD is certainly a way to increase anger & hate.
- stevespang 6y agoBy the way, both of the recent black men who were dealt with by police were FELONS with extensive criminal records. George Floyd once terrorized, robbed and beat a pregnant women at gunpoint for money and drugs . . . he had at least 9 run-ins with the law . . . https://twitter.com/i/status/1267678541602308096 https://twitter.com/i/status/1267678541602308096 Ahmaud Arbery had an extensive rap sheet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwIazUQWRtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwIazUQWRtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqHMM5G8Hn8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqHMM5G8Hn8 . . . and in the case of Manuel Ellis death of March 3rd, he walked up to Tacoma Police Officers and said, 'I have warrants, I need to talk.' As soon as the police officer got out of the car, he assaulted one of them and slam dunked him into the ground.” What do you expect ? Police are supposed to give him a lollipop ? Also, this isn't a "black" thing, many more whites are killed by police each year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
- bogwog 6y agoI hate how the internet makes everyone think they're smarter than everyone else. Scheming malicious losers write fake news and propaganda to incite anger in stupid and naive people, then skeptics come across it and become paranoid and angry, and then they make fake news and propaganda to incite anger in stupid and naive people. But in the end, everyone involved is a stupid naive scheming malicious paranoid loser. Regardless of who is behind these cyber attacks, whether its white supremacists, BLM protestors, anarchists, foreign state actors, or edgy 15 years olds in a Discord server with waifu profile pics, the end goal is the same: to make people angry, and possibly incite more riots. And it's going to succeed. And if you think about it too much, you'll just turn yourself into an angry paranoid wreck. Maybe the internet (or social media) wasn't such a good idea after all? The technology moved faster than our monkey brains could keep up.
- save_ferris 6y ago> The technology moved faster than our monkey brains could keep up. I think it’s important to remember the ways in which the internet has evolved that got us here. It’s not just a question of speed, but of incentives. The internet has long been a tool for huge tech companies to build businesses that can only exist as long as they remain largely unchecked and unregulated, and the stock market has cheered these efforts on. Now, we’re seeing the cost of giving everyone the ability to post whatever they want without having sustainable solutions to combat weaponized speech without compromising legitimate dissenting speech. This mistake largely falls on the market for rewarding this shortsightedness for so long. Social media companies have also known for years now that controversy drives incredible amounts of traffic to their platforms, which in turn drives revenue.
- bargl 6y ago>Now, we’re seeing the cost of giving everyone the ability to post whatever they want without having sustainable solutions to combat weaponized speech without compromising legitimate dissenting speech. This mistake largely falls on the market for rewarding this shortsightedness for so long. We've effectively connected and amplified the voice of every village idiot. Before, you knew who the village idiot was and you could ignore them. Now every village idiot gets a loud ass voice that goes to people who don't know them. All they know about the village idiot is they've got this idea that just crazy enough to work. All of which is amplified by clustering like people across villages. So your village has an idiot and mine does. Now they're hanging out coming up with conspiracies and acting foolish. Which creates less diversity. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Etc. are inherently tools against diversity of thought. Google wants to show me the last 10 videos I've watched for ages. Twitter, I don't use so i'm just lumping it in cuz everyone else seems to. Facebook at least shows me posts by people I know but again, people I know. In each of these cases it's up to the user to force diversity of thought into the platform. Our technological world doesn't promote the healthy and hard dialogues needed for people to grow as people. If I want to talk about black issues, I have to find a place where 1) I will get encouraged to have tough conversations (with likes etc). 2) Others will be encouraged to do the same. 3) Conversations can be nuanced enough that people will learn. 4) It will be real conversations with people who you can build a relationship where at least you recognize their name. 5) It needs to also discourage bad behavior such as trolling or abuse. I was going to lead into a conversation about how HN does or doesn't do this for me, but I think that'd detract from my overall idea. We need to figure out a way to encourage hard dialogue while refraining from encouraging trolling online. This seems to be a pretty hard thing to do without some sort of good localized human oversight, but IDK.
- noobermin 6y agoOn the one hand, I guess you expect something more sophisticated when someone mentions a "cyber-attack" but on the other hand, knowing the context (the article is in the general media, and sophisticated/intelligent/motivated actors don't really have a vested interest in attacking one-off activist groups), you really come to suspect it's nothing more than a DDOS attack.
- crazygringo 6y agoI was under the impression that these kinds of kids and hackers DDoS-ing sites for fun or activism were virtually all socially liberal, so attacks on government and military websites make sense to me. But I'm truly surprised to see anti-racism sites suffering from these attacks. Is there really a racist contingent of hackers out there? I just never thought of the two going together. Or is this more likely to be more Russian hacking efforts continuing to do their best to sow division, according to Putin's well-known playbook?
- skciva 6y agoThere are racists in every profession and walk of life. If you believe that being a hacker / someone with tech skills precludes you from having prejudice I hope you reflect on that belief.
- dfxm12 6y agoIs there really a racist contingent of hackers out there? Yes. I just never thought of the two going together. Why not? It's not like hacking is a social ideology in and of itself. It's not like racists or other non-socially liberal people can't grasp the idea of hacking.
- thrwaway69 6y agoI think they don't care as long as lulz. Don't think too much about what kids like to do in free time.
- kitotik 6y agoI’ve never understood this train of thought that kids have no meaningful thoughts or points of view. It’s not like adulthood has some magic turning point where ignorance turns to enlightenment. I’d wager that far more adults are manipulative, pathological liars than kids tend to be.
- thrwaway69 6y agoI think you misunderstood me. I didn't mean to generalize this over everything they do but lulz is a good enough reason for the online fake propaganda and trolling in 99% cases. Just go on discord and find 16 year old haxors with waifu pics. There's no profound political or sociological reason behind this like you mentioned yourself, adults are manipulative while kids tend not to be as much.
- foobar_ 6y agoHow do you tolerate people who are against tolerance in a tolerable way without becoming intolerant ?
- teddyh 6y agoEasy: You just redefine “tolerance” to include intolerance of some people. Done!
- scottlocklin 6y agoAs usual with this sort of "people doing things online" thing; a completely vacuous conspiracy theory. Here is the actual source article: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cyberattacks-since-the-murder-of-george-floyd/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cyberattacks-since-the-murder-of... Here is the plot showing something allegedly different happening this month: https://blog-cloudflare-com-assets.storage.googleapis.com/2020/06/1.png https://blog-cloudflare-com-assets.storage.googleapis.com/20... What's the p-value on a t-test of difference there, cloudflare spooks? By eyeball there is no difference. Then a completely unsubstantiated assertion: "The category with the biggest increase in cyberattacks was Advocacy Groups with a staggering increase of 1,120x." What are these Advocacy Groups of which you speak? The BBC implies it's the NAACP or something; Cloudflare spooks don't say at all -for all we know these "activist" websites are terrorists, racists, anarchist revolutionaries, video game fans: nobody but Cloudflare knows, assuming they're not just making it up, or making a mistake in their group-by query. Rather than reading this BBC report critically as the piece of nonsense propaganda it is, people on HN seem determined to fit it into whatever fantasies about Russians or Evil 4chan Racist Infiltrators or Weapons of Mass Destruction or whatever (mostly imaginary) bugaboos they're troubled by this week. Disgusting. Fools.
- 082349872349872 6y agothanks for the source article; it has the same graph as the BBC article, and references https://www.cloudflare.com/galileo/ https://www.cloudflare.com/galileo/
- gleenn 6y agoThat does read more like a Cloudflare advertisement, and they definitely don't add much in terms of who's being attacked. The graphs are pretty misleading with titles mentioning "since George Floyd's death" which would certainly give you the impression there is a relation but their data doesn't seem to back up that claim directly.
- krebs_liebhaber 6y agoIt's always an incredibly sad display when HN types talk about politics. The only thing they're less qualified to talk about is religion.
- tarkin2 6y agoWhy is this flagged?
- sna1l 6y agoWhy did this get flagged????