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.Anonymous threatens China, Hong Kong authorities with website blackout for DDoS attacks

Anonymous, the nebulous online activist group that uses hacking to further causes it supports, has threatened a major blackout of Chinese and Hong Kong government websites, and to leak tens of thousands of government email address details. The group, under the banner of ‘Operation Hong Kong’ or ‘#OpHongKong’ and ‘#OpHK’ on Twitter, said on Friday it will launch a mass effort against Chinese government servers to bring down their websites via Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Saturday. DDoS attacks attempt to cripple networks by overwhelming them with Internet traffic. “Here’s your heads up, prepare for us, try to stop it, the only success you will have will be taking all your sites offline,” an Anonymous statement posted online said. “China, you cannot stop us. You should have expected us before abusing your power against the citizens of Hong Kong.” Demonstrations in Hong Kong have seen the use of tear gas, violent clashes and mass disruptions to business and traffic as people campaign for the right to democratically elect the Asian financial hub’s leader. Hong Kong’s refusal so far to negotiate with protesters, and a police reaction that many labelled as heavy-handed, has sparked widespread condemnation that has now spread to Anonymous, which often campaigns for civil liberties by attacking people or institutions it sees as opponents of those rights. “If this is true, it will show that the Chinese government is a victim of internet hacking,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei at a daily news briefing. “ China has consistently stressed our opposition to all internet hacking attack activities. We rebuke the acts of this organisation.” The Chinese government’s Hong Kong Liaison Office also said its website had been attacked twice on Wednesday and Thursday, blocking visitors to the site for a time. “This kind of internet attack violates the law and social morals, and we have already reported it to the police,” it said, adding that the website was running normally again. Among the websites Anonymous said it would target are those of China’s Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Justice and Hong Kong police. “Prepping for massive DDoS attacks, Database dumps, etc… Will be destroying #China Government,” wrote one Anonymous participant on Twitter. China’s Defence Ministry, in a statement sent to Reuters, said its website was subject to numerous hacking attacks every day from both home and overseas. “We have taken necessary steps to protect the safe operation of the Defence Ministry website,” it added. The State Internet Information Office, China’s internet regulator, declined to comment. The Ministry of Public Security declined to immediately comment by telephone. The Hong Kong Police Force was not available for immediate comment. The Ministry of Justice said it was not aware of the threat from Anonymous, and that its website wasn’t its responsibility to maintain. The Legal Network Media Beijing Company, which maintains the Ministry of Justice site, said it had not had official notice about any attack, nor had it detected any attacks on the website so far. “If there are future hacking attacks, we have confidence they can be resolved,” said a technician at the company who gave his surname as Zhong.   Source: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/10/10/uk-china-hongkong-internet-idUKKCN0HZ0KY20141010

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.Anonymous threatens China, Hong Kong authorities with website blackout for DDoS attacks

DDoS Attacks Can Take Down Your Online Services Part 3: Defending Against DDoS Attacks

Various defense strategies can be invoked to defend against DDoS attacks. Many of these depend upon the intensity of the attack. We discuss some of these in this article. Mitigation Strategies Some protection from DDoS attacks can be provided by firewalls and intrusion-prevention systems (systems that monitor for malicious activity). When a DDoS attack begins, it is important to determine the method or methods that the attacker is using. The web site’s front-end networking devices and the server’s processing flow may be able to be reconfigured to stop the attack. UDP Attacks UDP (User Datagram Protocol) attacks send a mass of UDP requests to a victim system, which must respond to each request. One example is a ping attack. It is an enormous influx of ping requests from an attacker that requires the victim server to respond with ping responses. Another example of a UDP attack is when the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) must be used by the server to return error messages. The messages may indicate that a requested service is unavailable or that a host or router cannot be reached. An attacker may send UDP messages to random ports on the victim server, and the server must respond with a “port unreachable” ICMP message. Mitigation Strategy In the case of a UDP attack, the firewall could be configured to reject all UDP messages. True, this would prevent legitimate use of UDP messages, such as pings sent by monitoring services to measure the uptimes and response times of the web site. However, to be shown as failed by a monitoring service is much better than actually being down. SYN Attacks In a SYN attack, a mass of connection requests are sent to the victim server via SYN messages. Typically, the victim server will assign connection resources and will respond with SYN ACK messages. The server expects the requesting client to complete the connections with ACK messages. However, the attacker never completes the connections; and the server soon runs out of resources to handle further connection requests. Mitigation Strategy In this case, the server connection facility could be reconfigured so that it did not assign connection resources until it received the ACK from the client. This would slightly extend the time required to establish a connection but would protect the server from being overwhelmed by this sort of an attack. DNS Reflection Attack A DNS reflection attack allows an attacker to send a massive amount of malicious traffic to a victim server by generating a relatively small amount of traffic. DNS requests with a spoofed victim address are sent to multiple DNS systems to resolve a URL. The DNS servers respond to the victim system with DNS responses. What makes this sort of attack so efficient is that the DNS response is about 100 times as large as the DNS request. Therefore, the attacker only needs to generate 1% of the traffic that will be sent to the victim system. DNS reflection attacks depend upon DNS open resolvers that will accept requests from anywhere on the Internet. DNS open resolvers were supposed to have been removed from the Internet, but 27 million still remain. Mitigation Strategy A defense against DNS reflection attacks is to allow only DNS responses from the domain of the victim server to be passed to the server. Mitigation Services Given a sufficiently large DDoSattack, even the steps mentioned here may not protect a system. If nothing else, the attack can overwhelm the bandwidth of the victim’s connection to the Internet. In such cases, the next step is to use the services of a DDoS mitigation company with large data centers that can spread the attack volume over multiple data centers and can scrub the traffic to separate bad traffic from legitimate traffic. Prolexic, Tata Communications, AT&T, Verisign, CloudFare, and others are examples of DDoS mitigation providers. These services will also monitor the nature of the attack and will adjust their defenses to be effective in the face of an attacker that modifies its strategies as the attack progresses. Legality DDoS attacks are specifically outlawed by many countries. Violators in the U.K. can serve up to ten years in prison. The U.S. has similar penalties, as do most major countries. However, there are many countries from which DDoS attacks can be launched without penalty. With respect to the Spamhaus attack described in Part 1, the CEO of CyberBunker, a Dutch company, was arrested in Spain and was returned to the Netherlands for prosecution. Summary Companies must prepare for the likelihood of losing their public-facing web services and must make plans for how they will continue in operation if these services are taken down. This should be a major topic in their Business Continuity Plans. For instance, in the case of the bank attacks described in Part 1, many banks made plans to significantly increase their call center capabilities to handle customer services should their web sites be taken down by a DDoS attack. DDoS attacks are here to stay. They are motivated by too many factors – retaliation, political statements, aggressive competitors, ransom – and are fairly easy to launch. Botnets can be rented inexpensively. There are even sophisticated tools available on the darknet to launch significant attacks. The defenses against DDoS attacks are at best limited. The ultimate defense is to subscribe to a DDoS mitigation service that can be called upon when needed. Source: http://www.techproessentials.com/ddos-attacks-can-take-down-your-online-services-part-3-defending-against-ddos-attacks/

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DDoS Attacks Can Take Down Your Online Services Part 3: Defending Against DDoS Attacks

The History of DDoS Attacks as a Tool of Protest

Although the web is only a quarter of a century old, it already has a rich history as a platform for worldwide protest. One common tool used by online activists is the distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS: a technologically crude tactic that involves sending so many requests to a target website that it crashes. In recent years, politically motivated DDoS attacks have been launched on the websites of financial giants and local government departments. This year, websites affiliated with the football World Cup were brought down in protest against FIFA. “DDoS has been around as an activist tactic probably since the early 90s,” Molly Sauter, a research affiliate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and doctoral student at McGill University, told me. Sauter is the author of the upcoming book The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism and Civil Disobedience , which details the history of the DDoS attack from an obscure, insular activity carried out by artists and intellectuals to a hallmark of 21 st century protest. The earliest example of a DDoS attack that Sauter found in her research was implemented by the Strano Network, an Italian collective that launched an attack in 1995 to protest against the French government’s nuclear policy. Back then, DDoS attacks were laborious, manual affairs, requiring participants to constantly remain at their computer. And because having an internet connection was relatively expensive, they couldn’t last for long. The attack in this case only endured for about an hour. The next major milestone was the use of DDoS by the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT). Originating in the 90s, and attracting the attention of the media by the end of the decade, the hacktivist group described DDoS as akin to a “virtual sit-in.” One thing that separated them from their predecessors was their use of tools developed in-house, which allowed anyone outside of the organisation to join in. Their kit, called FloodNet, directed a user’s traffic to a target predetermined by the EDT, which included the websites of politicians and the White House. Those wishing to join the “sit-in” simply selected their target from a drop down menu, clicked attack, and relaxed while FloodNet automatically bombarded the offending server. The well-known hacker collective Anonymous took this idea of crowd-sourced activism further, and popularised the idea of voluntary botnets. Often used by criminals, a botnet is a large number of systems, all linked together, which give whoever is in charge of them a whole lot of processing power to wield. DDoS is incredibly simplistic, at a purely technological level. By using the hacker-designed software Low Orbit Ion Cannon, and its subsequent upgrades, participants could connect their computer to a vast network and have it donate resources to DDoS attacks. And that pretty much brings us up to today. “DDoS is incredibly simplistic, at a purely technological level,” Sauter said. “While there might be individual innovations in ways of masking or multiplying traffic, it’s not actually going to get much more advanced than that.” But it’s not just the technical details of DDoS that have mutated over the years. The scale of attacks using the device has developed, too. “Groups have become better at attracting, acknowledging and manipulating media coverage in order to attract more participants,” Sauter explained. While earlier groups just did their own thing, Anonymous managed to engage those outside of their immediate cohort more readily. With their iconic imagery, popular Twitter accounts and evocative videos, the media had a lot of material to work with. The press lacked any sort of official spokesperson of Anonymous to talk to—“So they just tended to reproduce these artifacts in media coverage, which did the work of recruitment for Anonymous,” Sauter observed. “Anonymous didn’t have to do a lot of ‘active’ outreach. That was being done for them.” What actually constitutes a ‘successful’ DDoS attack has also changed. “In the 90s, you could sit in front of your computer with your friends, go to whitehouse.gov, click refresh a bunch of times, and you had a significant chance of the website crashing,” said Sauter. An industry has since emerged to offer protection from DDoS attacks, so crashing a major service today is rarer, though still possible with some serious fire-power. But there’s another way to measure the success of DDoS actions than just website down time. Sauter explained that, when it comes to activism in general, “The logic of change is that you have an action, you get covered in the press, then politicians and the public react to the press coverage, not so much the action itself.” This overall impact is perhaps more important than how long a specific website is technically inaccessible. As Sauter said, “The question of what success means is fairly up in the air.” Some argue that DDoS as a protest tool should be formally recognised as political speech, and enjoy the same free-speech protections as street marches, for example. Jay Leiderman, a criminal defense lawyer, has argued that DDoS is a first amendment issue in defence of the “PayPal 14,” a group of WikiLeaks supporters involved in a DDoS attack against the e-commerce business. Attorney Stanley Cohen, who represented one of the accused, described the act as an “electronic sit in,” and members of Anonymous also created a petition, pushing for politically motivated DDoS to be legalised. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AND OTHER TYPES OF ORGANISED LAW BREAKING ONLINE ARE STILL CONSIDERED VERY MUCH FRINGE ACTIVITIES. But DDoS can of course also be used for much less sympathetic purposes. “The biggest problem that activist DDoS faces in terms of its fight for legitimacy is criminal DDoS,” said Sauter. “DDoS is a very popular tactic in terms of harassment, extortion and other criminality.” For example, botnets for DDoSing purposes are reportedly already being created to exploit the Shell Shock bug, a recently revealed weakness in Linux and Unix operating systems. Furthermore, Sauter suggested that online activism in general still isn’t really accepted because it remains an alien concept to many people. “Civil disobedience and other types of organised law breaking online are still considered very much fringe activities because there isn’t an understanding that civil disobedience is something that you can do on the internet,” Sauter said. “That I hope is something that will change, but it will take a legal challenge.” But Sauter feels that political DDoS will continue to gain popularity when it comes to activism, and that it might even have something more to give. Whether it’s the Electronic Disturbance Theater protesting against neoliberalism, or Anonymous rising up to fight what they see as injustices, DDoS actions do not exist in a vacuum. Today, politically motivated DDoS is often part of a broader activist culture in the information age. Sauter suggested it could therefore introduce activists to other ideas, “such as information exfiltration, and leaking, and the construction of alternative infrastructures to replace the corporate-dominated and government-surveilled that are currently the main ways of socialising and communicating online.” In short, DDoS attacks in activist circles can be about more than just crashing a few servers. Source: http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/history-of-the-ddos-attack

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The History of DDoS Attacks as a Tool of Protest

DDoS Attacks Target Online Gaming Sites, Enterprises

DDoS traffic volume was up overall with a third peaking at over 500Mbps and more than five percent reaching up to 4Gbps, according to NSFOCUS. A continuing trend of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that are short in duration and repeated frequently has been revealed by the NSFOCUS 2014 Mid-Year Threat report. In parallel, high-volume and high-rate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks were on the upswing in the first half of 2014. DDoS traffic volume was up overall with a third peaking at over 500Mbps and more than five percent reaching up to 4Gbps. In addition, findings showed that over 50 percent DDoS attacks were above 0.2Mpps in the first half of 2014, increasing from around 16 percent. More than 2 percent of DDoS attacks were launched at a rate of over 3.2Mpps, according to the report. “The DDoS attack is a relatively easy attack method to be employed with noticeable effects among other network attacks. When online service is stopped, the impact and damage it causes is very apparent and straightforward,” Xuhua Bao, senior researcher at NSFOCUS, told eWeek. “Attacks with high frequency make it hard for attack’ targets to respond to instantly, increasing the difficulty of the defense level.” The longest single attack lasted nine days and 11 hours, or 228 hours, while the single largest attack in terms of packet-per-second (pps) hit at a volume of 23 million pps. More than 42 percent of attack victims were targeted multiple times while one in every 40 victims was repeatedly hit more than 10 times. The highest frequency of attacks experienced by a single victim was 68 separate DDoS attacks. “Today, DDoS attack methods have become highly instrumental and resourceable. When an attacker plans to launch a DDoS attack on a specific target, there are plenty of DDoS attack tools and resources available online to be purchased and used,” Bao said. “With the rise of hacktavism in recent years, DDoS attacks have become a means of protesting or expressing your own opinion, which is widely used by some hacker groups.” The report revealed HTTP Flood, TCP Flood and DNS Flood were the top three attack types, together making up 84.6 percent of all attacks. DNS Flood attacks held their place as the most popular attack method, accounting for 42 percent of all attacks. While the number of DNS and HTTP Flood attacks decreased, TCP Flood attacks grew substantially. More than 90 percent of attacks detected lasted less than 30 minutes, an ongoing trend the report said indicates that latency-sensitive websites, such as online gaming, e-commerce and hosting service should be prepared to implement security solutions that support rapid response. The survey also indicated an increase in Internet service providers (ISPs), enterprises and online gaming sites as targets. Attacks targeting ISPs increased by 87.2 percent, while attacks on enterprises jumped by 100.5 percent and online gaming by 60 percent. “The online gaming industry has been a target of DDoS attacks and are mainly profit-driven. The nature of online gaming relies greatly on the Internet service and often there is a huge amount of money involved making them extremely sensitive to attacks,” Bao said. “When they are being attacked, there are obvious and direct economic losses, as well as the loss of the resources from players, which leads to malicious competition and extortion.” Source: http://www.eweek.com/small-business/ddos-attacks-target-online-gaming-sites-enterprises.html

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DDoS Attacks Target Online Gaming Sites, Enterprises

Chain Radio Returns After A Massive DDoS Attack

Who’d have thought it would be such a chore to run a radio station? Chain Radio, which launched a at the end of July, and since then they’ve dealt with some major issues. Namely, they’ve been the subject of DDoS attacks for weeks, but it really caught up with them in the last week. Rockstar, the head of Chain Radio, made a post on their page talking about what they’ve had to deal with in order to get their site up and running again, and the challenges they’ve faced. Unlike many other sites in the world of Bitcoin land we are operating a fleet of streaming servers which can not be simply placed behind the protection of CloudFlare. When someone is attacking our servers we are in a constant state of battle blocking IP ranges, blocking specific IPs and trying to keep everything online. Nevertheless, Rockstar remained defiant in the face of adversity. “It costs us over a thousand dollars each month to keep this service online for our listeners and if the DDOS attacks continue it will likely cost even more,” he said. “That said, we are committed to seeing this project through and NOT letting a few jerks silence what we are doing and the community that we are creating.” As to the identity of those “few jerks” and their motives, it remains unknown. As of this writing, Chain Radio is back up and running. They’re running a non-profit operation, relying largely on donations from the community. They’re taking donations to help offset the cost of the project through their website. Source: http://thecoinfront.com/chain-radio-returns-after-a-massive-ddos-attack/

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Chain Radio Returns After A Massive DDoS Attack

Japanese Teen Sent to Prosecutors over DDoS Attack

Japanese police sent papers on a 16-year-old boy to public prosecutors Thursday over a suspected distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on an online game company. It was the first criminal accusation by police in the country against a DDoS attack, which entails saturating a particular server or computer with large amounts of data, according to Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department. The high school student in the southwestern city of Kumamoto has admitted the charges, sources familiar with police investigations said. He told investigators that he was frustrated after the game company froze his game account and that he had a lot of fun to make numerous attacks, according to the sources. He is suspected of carrying out similar attacks on two other companies as well, the sources said. Source: http://jen.jiji.com/jc/i?g=eco&k=2014091800573

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Japanese Teen Sent to Prosecutors over DDoS Attack

SNMP-Based DDoS Attack Spoofs Google Public DNS Server

The SANS Internet Storm Center this afternoon reported SNMP scans spoofed from Google’s public recursive DNS server seeking to overwhelm vulnerable routers and other devices that support the protocol with DDoS traffic. “The traffic is spoofed, and claims to come from Google’s DNS server. The attack is however not an attack against Google. It is likely an attack against misconfigured gateways,” said Johannes Ullrich, dean of research of the SANS Technology Institute and head of the Internet Storm Center. Ullrich said the ISC is still investigating the scale of the possible attacks, but said the few packets that have been submitted target default passwords used by SNMP. “The attack uses the default ‘read/write’ community string of ‘private.’ SNMP uses this string as a password, and ‘private’ is a common default,” Ullrich said. “For read-only access, the common default is ‘public.’” Ullrich explained that the attack tries to change configuration variables in the affected device, the TTL or Time To Live variable to 1 which he said prevents any future traffic leaving the gateway, and it also sets the Forwarding variable to 2, which shuts it off. “If this works, it would amount to a [DDoS] against the network used by the vulnerable router,” Ullrich said. Large-scale DDoS attacks rely on amplification or reflection techniques to amp up the amount of traffic directed at a target. DNS reflection attacks are a time-tested means of taking down networks with hackers taking advantage of the millions of open DNS resolvers on the Internet to get up to 100 to 1 amplification rates for every byte sent out. Earlier this year, home routers were targeted in DNS-based amplification attacks; more than five million were used during February alone as the starting point for DDoS attacks. Also earlier this year, hackers found a soft spot in Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers that synch time for servers across the Internet. NTP-based DDoS attacks, some reaching 400 Gbps, were keeping critical services offline. However, a concerted patching effort has kept these attacks at bay and in June, NSFocus reported that of the 430,000 vulnerable NTP servers found in February, all but 17,000 had been patched. Experts, however, warned that SNMP-based DDoS attacks could be the next major area of concern. Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare, said in February that SNMP attacks could dwarf DNS and NTP. “If you think NTP is bad, just wait for what’s next. SNMP has a theoretical 650x amplification factor,” Prince said. “We’ve already begun to see evidence attackers have begun to experiment with using it as a DDoS vector. Buckle up.” SANS’ Ullrich, meanwhile, said he’s continuing to research this attack, and admins should be on the lookout for packets from the source IP 8.8.8.8, which is Google’s DNS server, with a target UDP port of 161. “Just like other UDP based protocols (DNS and NTP), SNMP has some queries that lead to large responses and it can be used as an amplifier that way,” Ullrich said. Source: http://threatpost.com/snmp-based-ddos-attack-spoofs-google-public-dns-server

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SNMP-Based DDoS Attack Spoofs Google Public DNS Server

DDoS reflection/amplification attacks disrupting ISP networks

Attacks being used by gamers to settle disputes and by people with rudimentary hacking skills to target companies Reflection/amplification distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have now become so large that entire ISP networks are getting disrupted, says a networking security expert. Arbor Networks senior security engineering & response team (ASERT) analyst Roland Dobbins told Computerworld Australia that DDoS attacks are being used by gamers to settle disputes and by people with rudimentary hacking skills to target companies. “The main characteristic of these attacks is that they are huge. The biggest one we have seen so far was 400Gb/s. Because these attacks are so large, they fill up the pipes of Internet service providers [ISPs], the peering and transit links,” he said. According to Dobbins, the attacks are possible because many ISPs and enterprise networks have not implemented universal anti spoofing measures. “The way these [DDoS] attacks work is that the attacker will try to get control of a computer on a network that does not enforce IP source validation. [The attacker] spoofs the IP address of his target and sends a bunch of queries to a misconfigured server.” The misconfigured server answers these queries and “pummels” the target of the attack with unsolicited responses, he said. “It’s as if I called up 20 pizza parlours in Sydney, pretended to be someone else and ordered a lot of large pizzas to be delivered to that person.” The largest reflection/amplification DDoS attack recorded in Australia by Arbor Networks staff was 62Gb/s, he said. The attack, which took place in early 2014, appeared to be triggered by an online gaming dispute. “Since October 2013, there has been an explosion in these attacks that online gamers use. One player gets a grudge against another and decides to be unsportsman like and resort to a DDoS attack. It’s like using a nuclear weapon to solve a playground dispute,” he said. Dobbins had three tips for ISPs to avoid reflection/amplification DDoS attacks. The first was that ISPs should enforce anti-spoofing or source address validation at the edges of their network. “The second thing they [ISPs] can do is make sure they utilise flow telemetry analysis from routers and switches. This provides real time visibility into network traffic. When these attack floods traverse their network, they can detect it and trace it back [to the source] immediately,” he said. “The third thing they need to do is implement reaction and mitigation mechanisms. One of these is called an intelligent DDoS mitigation system [IDMS].” “If they have these reaction and mitigation tools to deal with this attack traffic, they will be in a much better position to deal with these events and minimise disruption,” said Dobbins. Source: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/554558/ddos-reflection-amplification-attacks-disrupting-isp-networks-analyst/

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DDoS reflection/amplification attacks disrupting ISP networks

Anti-Piracy Outfit Denies launching DDoS attacks on Anime Sites

The effects of a DDoS attack that crippled NYAA, one of the largest anime torrent sites, continue today with fingers being pointed at everyone from the Japanese government to an anti-piracy group working with anime distributors. Subtitling site HorribleSubs, which was also affected, has its own ideas. Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks are a relatively common occurrence in the file-sharing community and something that many sites are subjected to throughout the course of a year. They disrupt service and can often cost money to mitigate. Those carrying out the attacks have a variety of motives, from extortion and blackmail to “the lulz“, and a dozen reasons in between. Often the reasons are never discovered. During the past few days several sites involved in the unauthorized sharing of anime have been targeted by DDoS-style attacks. Swaps24 reported that Haruhichan, Tokyo Toshokan and AnimeTake were under assault from assailants unknown, although all now appear to be back online. A far more serious situation has played out at NYAA.se, however. The site is probably the largest public dedicated anime torrent index around and after being hit with an attack last weekend it remains offline today. The attack on NYAA had wider effects too. NYAA and leading fan-subbing site HorribleSubs reportedly shared the same hosting infrastructure so the DDoS attack took down both sites. That’s significant, not least since at the end of August HorribleSubs reported that their titles had been downloaded half a billion times. As the image above shows it now appears that HorribleSubs has recovered (and added torrent magnet links) but the same cannot be said about NYAA. The site’s extended downtime continues with no apparent end in sight. This has resulted in a backlash from the site’s fans and somewhat inevitably accusatory fingers are being pointed at potential DDoS suspects. As far-fetched as it might sound, one of the early suspects was the Japanese government itself. The launch of a brand new anti-piracy campaign last month in partnership with 15 producers certainly provided a motive, but a nation carrying out this kind of assault seems unlikely in the extreme. Quickly, however, an announcement from HorribleSubs turned attentions elsewhere. “Chill down. It’s not just us. Every famous anime sites [are] getting DDoS attacks, but that doesn’t mean this is the end,” the site’s operator wrote on Facebook. “We have located where DDoS are coming from. It’s from ?#?Crunchyroll? and ?#?Funimation? Employees.” Funimation is an US television and film production company best known for its distribution of anime while Crunchyroll is a website and community focused on, among other things, Asian anime and manga. While both could at least have a motive to carry out a DDoS, no evidence has been produced to back up the HorribleSubs claims. That said, HorribleSubs admits that its key motivation is to annoy Crunchyroll. “We do not translate our own shows because we rip from Crunchyroll, FUNimation, Hulu, The Anime Network, Niconico, and Daisuki,” the site’s about page reads, adding: “We aren’t doing this for e-penis but for the sole reason of pissing off Crunchyroll.” Shortly after, attention turned to anti-piracy outfit Remove Your Media (RYM). The company works with anime companies Funimation and Viz Media, which includes the sending of millions of DMCA notices to Google. The spark came when the company published a tweet (now removed) which threatened to send “thousands” of warning letters to NYAA users once the site was back online. This doesn’t seem like an idle threat. A few weeks ago the company posted a screenshot on Twitter containing an unredacted list of Comcast, Charter and CenturyLink IP addresses said to have been monitored infringing copyright. Due to the NYAA downtime, RYM later indicated it had switched to warning users of Kickass.to. This involvement with anime companies combined with the warning notice statement led to DDoS accusations being directed at RYM. TorrentFreak spoke to the company’s Eric Green and asked if they knew anything about the attacks. “The short answer is No. In fact we were waiting for [NYAA] to go back online to begin monitoring illegal transfers again. Sorry to disappoint but we had no involvement,” Green told TF. Just a couple of hours ago RYM made a new announcement on Twitter, stating that the original tweet had been removed due to false accusations. “Nyaa post deleted due to all the Ddos libel directed at this account. Infringement notices continue to ISPs, for piracy, regardless of tracker,” they conclude. Although it’s impossible to say who is behind the attacks, it does seem improbable that an anti-piracy company getting paid to send notices would do something that is a) seriously illegal and b) counter-productive to getting paid for sending notices. That said, it seems likely that someone who doesn’t appreciate unofficial anime sites operating smoothly is behind the attack. Who that might be will remain a mystery, at least for now. Source: http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-outfit-denies-ddosing-anime-sites-140904/

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Anti-Piracy Outfit Denies launching DDoS attacks on Anime Sites