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The "Daily Stormer", a neo-Nazi website that has been having trouble staying online since Charlottesville, has once again been shutdown.
According to The Verge:
The neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer briefly returned to the web today, using a new URL and a string of new hosts to dodge the bans that took it off the internet last week. The site reappeared this morning at the address Punished-stormer.com, apparently using Dreamhost as both a host and DNS provider.
[note: url modified]
Shortly after the new site became public, Anonymous groups began a denial-of-service attack against it, targeting the Dreamhost DNS infrastructure that makes the site accessible to the rest of the web. The result was nearly two hours of intermittent downtime for the countless sites using Dreamhost's DNS infrastructure.
In WWII, things like this were called "collateral damage", where innocent casualties were necessary in order to get at the Nazis themselves. But is this sort of action legitimate on the internet? Especially by non-governmental organizations?
Also reported at https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2017/08/dreamhost-ddos-attack/
Related story: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/21/16180614/charlottesville-daily-stormer-alt-right-internet-domain
(Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday August 26 2017, @07:40PM (1 child)
That's not exactly what happened though, and it's a little worse. I know Anonymous has announced war against them, but the reality is that they attacked "countless" other innocent people while trying to shut up the Daily Stormer. These are not surgical strikes, but like using the Death Star on a planet to silence the one bigoted asshole in a bar that kept pissing you off.
I can understand hacking the website, defacing the website, doxxing the operators, deleting backups, etc., but I can't understand why you would attack other unrelated people. It seems like the only way to attack some websites these days is with massive collateral damage. That removes what moral superiority the attackers thought they had, and it devolves into gang bangers doing drive-bys. There is no moral superiority anyways in trying to cripple somebody's ability to speak.
The Daily Stormer should be able to come back up with a domain and hosting from a home server, but the reality is that they need a very large private entity strong enough to protect them. Nothing makes the big players have to accept them as a customer, but they should. If only to prevent the chilling of free speech everywhere. Liabilities will make them want to charge them a shitload, or just let them go. That happened with some security researcher who was under the largest DDOS attack ever.
Today it's the Daily Stormer, but tomorrow it could be a protest site that you or I might agree with and support. That's why they're not just missing the point, but shooting themselves and the rest of us in the foot.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 26 2017, @10:10PM
The only problem with trying to compare cyber warfare to actual warfare is that no one has (yet) died because of a cyber attack. All this crying about DDOS, hacking and defacement, (notice I omitted doxing on purpose, that one broaches into the real world) but no one is directly affected by this 'attack' other than long hours for the administrative team. I know it's fun to frame everything in violence (war on drugs, war on cancer, war on libruls and immagrunts etc), but how about we stop using fighting words and talk about this again like knowledgeable adults.
Anyone connected to the public internet is potentially a target for DDOS, hacking or defacement. It's been a risk since the beginning of the Internet. It was never a newsworthy occurrence before because we rely on the Internet more no one had connections as fast as some do now. It was an illusion that the Internet was ever a 'safe' place in the first place. It's always been about who's a bigger and/or better target. Popular websites are targeted more often because the chance of actually finding something useful or being seen by more people is larger than hacking your cultural expression blog. FB, Google, and MS all have to deal with large scale clandestine hacking attempts all the time. They can afford to either implement or pay to implement the technology that's required to mitigate such attacks. Can your 'friends'?
What has happened is that through the actions of their administrators EVERYONE knows who the Daily Stormer is now and can infer contextually what they believe. They have stood out in broad daylight at a gathering that chanted known Nazi slogans while wielding Nazi symbols on flags and banners. They showed the world who they are. By doing so, they have painted a large red target on themselves. Their actions (and words) then speak louder than their feeble bleating now that it was not supposed to be a white supremacist gathering. The appearances said otherwise. Can we expect any other response? Yes there are many online who want to take it on themselves to dispense vigilante justice. I don't condone it, but let's not pretend that this wasn't expected as soon as they opened their big mouths at Charlottesville. You're not free from the consequences of what you say. Sometimes that means being confronted for your bad beliefs by another just as large asshole from the other side of the debate.