Late last week, cyberjihadists targeted Hosting Matters blogs twice in apparent retaliation for provocative photos posted by Hosting Matters blog “Aaron’s CC”. This is what his site looked like for a few hours. Over 100 blogs went down due to DoS collateral damage, and some of them were big players:
Instapundit – Power Line – Captain’s Quarters
Radioblogger – Hugh Hewitt – IMAO – Counterterrorism Blog – Castle Arggh!
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler – Blogs4Bush – Sondra K
The primary source was a machine in Saudi Arabia, although the nature of DoS attacks is that they originate from any number of places, via machines that are zombied, trojaned, or otherwise compromised. Said a representative from Hosting Matters: “Neither our own authorities (based on our experience with investigations of DoS attacks and other types of attacks) nor those in the country of origination are going to care about this enough to do anything about it. It’s a sad fact of life.”
A denial-of-service attack (also, DoS attack) is an attack on a computer system or network that causes a loss of service to users, typically the loss of network connectivity and services by consuming the bandwidth of the victim network or overloading the computational resources of the victim system.
A nuke attack sends a packet, usually ICMP, which is malformed or fragmented in an invalid way, triggering a bug in the operating system and crashing the targeted computer. Other kinds of DoS rely primarily on brute force, flooding the target with an overwhelming flux of packets, oversaturating its connection bandwidth or depleting the target’s system resources.
Yesterday we learned that at approximately 4:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time on May 2nd, Six Apart had been the victim of a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack. This had affected all of Six Apart’s sites, causing intermittent and limited availability for TypePad, LiveJournal, TypeKey, sixapart.com, movabletype.org and movabletype.com. By Wednesday morning Six Apart had been stable for several hours, implying that this attack was now over.
Many of the defacements of the blogs contained text something like this:
NeEeO_HaCk
This Site is Hacked by -
?? ??? ??? ???? ???? ???? ????
x.neo@hotmail.com
Aaron asks, in regard to the attack directed at him: “Do foreigners have the right to impose their Dark Ages standards on our First Amendment and commit destructive vandalism here in the US toward that end?”
Says Michelle Malkin:
For the record: I do not approve of the cartoon Aaron posted that prompted the Saudi-based attacks, but every blogger in the ‘sphere worth their bandwidth should vigorously defend his freedom to criticize, ridicule, and challenge the jihadis. If we let a few anonymous Muslim computer thugs dictate what one blogger can say about Mohammed or Islam, who’s next?
I said last week that we are all affected by these attacks. If you haven’t been paying attention to this ongoing war, wake up. Help out those who are targeted. It’s not an isolated phenomenon, and it’s not going away.
Dangerous cyberterrorists, restless cyberjihadists or simply muslim annoyed script kiddies who discovered the power of the Internet? Zone-H thinks is the latter: “This is probably a single annoyed Muslim script kiddie (the lowest form of crackers), most probably teenager, who discovered the power of the Internet.”
Whatever the reason, it’s good to have everyone back up and running. Freedom Of Repression is a foreign concept to those of us born with Freedom Of Expression.
cyberjihad, blog, DoS, denial-of-service, bandwidth
