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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare supports hacking group by providing them services -> gets hacked by them. Reminds me very much of what happens in every episode of 24, the terrorists kill their accomplices after they're finished with them, it never works out for anyone involved.

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Lulzsec and the people that did this are not necessarily the same.

I find it a bit strange to lump a hosting provider together with terrorists accomplices.

News report about CloudFare and Lulzsec: http://www.it-networks.org/2012/03/01/how-cloudflare-kept-lu...

I know the groups are different, my observation was that Cloudflare supports these groups by providing them with services and in return they themselves become a target of such groups. My terrorist comment wasn't comparing them to terrorists, I guess a better point would have been "no honor among thieves". Cloudflare support these sort of groups and in return they are targeted.

Why would they not be targeted if they didn't support them? I see no correlation, the point seems very strained.

There was no correlation, I was just making an observation, maybe it wasn't appropriate for HN.

Actually i think your right, your "observation" wasn't very appropriate.

Because your saying that you "observe" that a company who supported a certain group of hackers, got hacked back by someone we don't even know (maybe UGNazi, but who knows for sure). And then you look at it as if it was "funny" saying something like "see, no honor between thieves".

But... there's no point. Yeah because they got hacked like any other company could have been to get access to some of their clients data. And it's not like if what they did for LulzSec was to protect themselves of those sort of attacks. It's totally unrealistic to think that just by "helping" a group of hacker they would be totally immune against attacks from other groups. Imagine if Google also had helped a pair of hackers guys, would you except that the others hackers, decide, for honor, to not attack Gmail anymore ?

Which "hacking group" was supported by Cloudflare?

lulzsec

Lulzsec was the most prominent, they used Cloudflare to keep their sites online, Cloudflare used it as a marketing tool, here's a blog post about it: http://blog.cloudflare.com/58611873

Cloudflare doesn't necessarily "support" hacker groups- although their CEO did a great talk at Defcon last year about keeping Lulsec up (which I consider more of an activist group than a hacker group, personally). However, they do very little to keep their network safe- they have no dedicated abuse team (or, if they do, they're impossible to contact directly), are slow to response to abuse requests (if they respond at all), and even when they do respond take only the most basic steps to filter the issues (which takes literally minutes for their account holders to work around, and they don't actually disable the accounts).

Dozens, if not hundreds, of hacker and malware related sites use Cloudflare to mask their origin and essentially use the other shared sites as hostages. If you block one of the malicious sites then you also end up blocking legitimate sites, and since Cloudflare goes out of their way to not take down sites (even those hosting malicious programs- including the drive by exploits that install them) it makes it very difficult to trace the malware back to it's source or actually take it down and stop people from getting infected.

I'm hoping that with the coming of IPv6 many of these issues are going to go away. At that point Cloudflare could give every customer their own /128 that is static across the world (they route their /64 or /48 however they please using anycast) and forward traffic as they have always done with caching.

Then it becomes trivial to block a single IP, since it is assigned to a single customer you won't have any collateral damage!

CloudFlare does in fact have a dedicated abuse team. It's extremely easy to contact us actually using our reporting page: https://cloudflare.com/abuse

If you do happen to have a report then please feel free to actually send it our way with specific details.

In fact, we respond to every single report that we receive.

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