4chan has been DDOSed | Hacker News Reader

4chan has been DDOSed

status.4chan.org

79 pointsroadnottaken48 comments

Well, at least nobody can accuse them of not having a sense of humor; from their status page: "We now join the ranks of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, et al.—an exclusive club!" :)

http://status.4chan.org/index.html#2340645311017721788

That's just the owner of 4chan, who I doubt condones the attacks his community performs on other sites. This status page doesn't represent how the channers feel about not being able to access something they want to access.

I like your emphasis! I will never ever tell my story enough of how I was in a really sad story in a developing country, badly in need of (a lot of) cash and ended up borrowing what is here several months worth salary from a local friend to settle the issue because I couldn't withdraw from ATMs thanks to Anonymous.

That is the day I truly realized there was at least one person I could ask anything, so I'm not too mad at them. Well maybe that's because I put myself into that situation too :)

When did Anonymous disable an interbank network?

Interbank network? Have you been to some of the rural dumps in North America or Europe that are modem based?

I even saw one in rural France that used a web interface and kept 404ing people.

That's a very good point! I actually have no proof that they were the cause of the problem. I assumed it was them because it happened at the same time and I remember a news saying that Visa and MasterCard services were disrupted.

As far as I can tell, they only disrupted their web pages.

Doesn't this happen once every couple of months?

No news here; 4chan gets DDoSed all the time. Whether it's Kimmo Alm from Anontalk, or the orange box fiasco (not necessarily disparate events), or a back-raid, or, or, or... They make themselves a target. This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with recent activities.

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leaves everybody blind and toothless. Obviously.

I critiqued this usage before so... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1706850

Oh, the irony.

I wonder which three-letter agency is doing it? EDIT: Or could it be the BofA War Room?

Three Letter Agencies don't have to DDOS. They just send in the heavies. It's cheaper.

Cheaper than just hiring out a botnet?

Can you imagine how many meetings it would take for the US security agencies to go about hiring a botnet? Whereas they have a pretty much unlimited supply of heavies on retainer.

What the heck is a "heavy?"

Not your brother.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=heavies It's a general term for a grunt. In this context think: Black SUV, black suit, silenced pistol, shades.

He's a tall, muscular, bald Russian guy who likes guns, sandwiches and has an unhealthy bond with his family physician...I think.

Russians in general are not that fond of sandwiches!

I thought all men loved sandwiches... "Make me a sandwich!"

sudo shut up

Thanks. I love not only your appreciation of humour, but also your loving demeanor.

So...Karnov? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnov

I figured it was a Team Fortress reference. Considering both of the 'agencies' that control the teams are denoted by three letters (BLU, and RED).

He is credit to team.

Especially given the DDOS against Wikileaks, I'm pretty sure they also have at least one botnet on retainer.

And there have been voices high up in the government saying that the US needs to develop offensive cyberwarfare capability. If that's not a call to develop state-owned botnets... the people in charge don't understand technology.

Of course, the use of the term cyberwarfare might be a giveaway anyway.

In any case, I'm sure it's a pretty simple matter for some people in the CIA to quietly hire out a botnet.

Why can't they just send out a heavy who knows someone who knows someone with a botnet?

There are so many legal difficulties with DDoS, you can almost guarantee that neither a bank nor a government agency is likely to do it, regardless of paranoid delusions. As for the government, they generally have more effective means so long as their target's servers aren't located in the ass-end of nowhere.

I doubt that. Contractors. Pick up the phone, and they say, Do it.

You've been watching too many movies. In reality most spy and law enforcement agencies are huge, bureaucratic messes that can barely get anything done, even if national security is clearly at stake.

My guess would be that 4chan is somehow DDOSing itself, in pursuit of some subtle poetic irony outsiders like us simply could not understand.

The packets are coming from inside the house!

Ebaumsworld. It's always Ebaumsworld.

I miss the Something Awful vs. Ebaumsworld internet fights from back in the day.

In my day, the goons were always fighting against the farkers. Ebaumsworlds didnt reach their radar.

I can't claim to understand 4chan, but it reminds me of 4chan's past reactions to negative press such as the "Ya dun goofed" incident.

For those who didn't notice "Ya dun goofed" here is a brief summary: 4chan trolled a young girl to tears, provoking the rage of her dad, who then called the police. The incident of cyber bullying caused widespread media coverage, and 4chan responded by briefly adding music to /b/, removing porn ads, calling it SFW (with the blue background theme), posting kittens and rainbows, and deleting porn threads. Needless to say /b/ quickly tired of this and returned to their old ways. However, I mentioned it as an example of 4chan's long history of alternating between making themselves look really bad, and then trying to make themselves look good.

I may be that they are running this DDOS on themselves so that they will be seen as innocent victims just like Paypal, Mastercard, etc.

> seen as innocent victims

Anonymous is as much 4chan as Reddit is Hacker News, so more likely they're mocking Paypal, Mastercard.

It's Anonymous. I don't have access to Twitter right now, but they make it pretty clear it's them.

Either they do it for lulz, or they believe moot has worked together with FBI.

ebaum's?

Anyone fancy heading down to the anonymous IRC chans to find out what they're saying about it? I would but I don't know where they are, and I don't want to think about what horrors the anon crew might have googlebombed to the top of the "4chan anonymous irc channel server" results.

That query has the first result leading to 4chan.org/faq. Their IRC channel is located at #4chan at Rizon (irc.rizon.net)

Well, at least those kids might take in some Vitamin D today. Some might even do something interesting.

Nah. They'll just go to SomethingAweful.

No they'll probably just run an auto-refresher and play Xbox and spam up Halo: Reach with moronic chatter and team kills.

Isn't this like pissing into the cell pool?

Begun, the cyberwars have.

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