Live data from Hacker News

Anti-racism sites hit by wave of cyber-attacks

bbc.com

51–60 of 116 posts

Re: Anti-racism sites hit by wave of cyber-attacks

#52
On 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.

Re: Anti-racism sites hit by wave of cyber-attacks

#53

Anti-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.

> Anonymous/4chan

Anonymous has had nothing to do with 4chan for like 8years. Anonymous a leftwing organization through and through.

4chan is not an organization but an open forum, so if this was organized there, then you should be able to provide evidence.

You are throwing out hypotheses up that sound plausible and go along with the narrative, which is fine, but then everyone is jumping to treating it like established fact.

Re: Anti-racism sites hit by wave of cyber-attacks

#54

I 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.

DDoS 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.

Re: Anti-racism sites hit by wave of cyber-attacks

#55

I 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.

I'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.)

Re: Anti-racism sites hit by wave of cyber-attacks

#56
I 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?

Re: Anti-racism sites hit by wave of cyber-attacks

#57

Anti-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.

You’re right, it specifically involves the /k/ board and Facebook groups among other platforms. The levels of subterfuge and dog whistling are a whole meme subculture unto itself.

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-move...

Re: Anti-racism sites hit by wave of cyber-attacks

#58

Anti-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.

Not just them, but also more recent stuff like the boogaloo movement[1]. [1] 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.

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-move...

Re: Anti-racism sites hit by wave of cyber-attacks

#59
post #20
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't feed the trolls. This is coming from a ten minute old green account.

In 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.

We have to start avoiding latin names in things now? Fuck that. Are you sure you're not generalizing a bit too much?

Re: Anti-racism sites hit by wave of cyber-attacks

#60
post #50

I 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. Reg…

> 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.

Post reply on HN