4chan May Have Brought Down Pro-Clinton Phone Lines Before Election Day (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Yesterday, as groups across the country hit the final stretch of their get-out-the-vote campaigns, workers at NextGen Climate noticed some problems with their automated dialer program. As the team started its morning hours, the program used to initiate and monitor voter calls was suddenly clunky, and cut out entirely for crucial hours in the afternoon. The downtime wasn't a coincidence. Just after midnight on Sunday night, a post on 4chan's /pol/ board announced an impending denial-of-service attack on any tools used by the Clinton campaign, employing the same Mirai botnet code that blocked access to Twitter and Spotify last month. One of those targets was TCN, the Utah-based call center company that runs NextGen's dialer. According to the post's author, the company was also providing phone services to Hillary Clinton's offices in Nevada. "List targets here that if taken out could harm Clinton's chances of winning and I will pounce on them like a wild animal," the post reads. "Not sleeping until after this election is over." TCN confirmed the outage in a statement, describing the attack as "fairly sophisticated in nature." According to the statement, "the primary impacts were a slow site and a few brief periods of unavailability." The statement also makes it clear that NextGen Climate was far from the only group slowed down by the outage. TCN manages calling services for 2000 different clients, with a particularly brisk business during campaign season handling "everything from inbound information IVRs, outbound surveys to volunteer outreach."

Comments

I'm conflicted

[93 Escort Wagon]

I hate this sort of thing, generally speaking... but bringing down an auto-dialer farm seems like a net plus for humanity.

Re:I'm conflicted

[wierd_w]

Agreed. I would feel much better about this if they had targeted all of the campaign autodialer firms, and not just Hillary's. An election free from hounding pollsters, cold calls, and attack ads would be like waking up from a bad dream.

Too bad the autodialers diversify and innocent services get impacted by the denial of service.

Re:I'm conflicted

[markdavis]

I am not conflicted at all.

ALL autodialing systems should be illegal and a criminal offense. A system should be developed to prevent all ID spoofing and a target should be able to press a simple code number to have it reported directly to an agency who is required to research and prosecute. Such calls are beyond annoying, stupid, and an invasion of privacy. ANY system taken down is a plus, regardless of what type, source, or target.

DIE!

Re:I'm conflicted

[PRMan]

Get Ooma with the Community Blacklist. I didn't get a single political call this year. I almost never get sales calls either. In fact, when Ooma actually rings, it's somebody I want to talk to. WELL worth $9.99 per month.

Re:I'm conflicted

[JustNiz]

>> ALL autodialing systems should be illegal and a criminal offense.

I'll go further and say that any unsolicted marketing calls should be illegal, as should be spoofing your caller ID.

It boggles my mind that phone companies haven't already been ordered to provide the caller's number themselves rather than allow the caller to do so.

Re:I'm conflicted

[Z80a]

Most of the 4chan is actually pretty decent.
It's mostly /pol/ that is a bit of a fuck up, but its a fuck up you still can argue with.

Re:I'm conflicted

[Darinbob]

Hacking one side but not the other is clearly politicialy biased, and deserving of jail time if ever there was someone deserving of jail time for a DDoS. This is not civil disobedience but is clearly assholish destruction. Democracy needs to have fair and open elections that are not tweaked because some kid in a basement thinks that his preferred moron for office is better than another moron for office. All voices need to be heard so trying to force some voices to shut up is anti-democratic.

Re:I'm conflicted

[DutchUncle]

>>> ... phone companies haven't already been ordered to provide the caller's number themselves rather than allow the caller to do so.

I used to work in telephone systems. The ability to set an ID was INTENDED to allow reasonable situations, e.g. any outgoing call from a switchboard showing the general switchboard number (or perhaps a departmental number) rather than the individual number of the switchboard's "hunt group" by which the call is actually controlled in the PSTN. If you specify the definition of "spoofing" as setting a caller ID that does not reverse-identify to the same owner, I agree with you 100% (even though that would eliminate some old-style legitimate uses, like a doctor being able to call from a hospital but have the caller ID show his office number) (which was a useful trick when using someone else's phone, before everyone had their own cellphone).

Re:I'm conflicted

[alvinrod]

I don't care if you want to classify it as civil disobedience or not, suppressing someone else's speech is antithetical to a free society. The answer to speech that you dislike is more to oppose it with your own free speech, not to shut it down.

If you find phone banks utterly detestable, the solution is to start a political campaign to end them and then point a phone bank of your own at the various members of Congress. Perhaps they'll quickly grow less fond of the notion that robodialers are perfectly legal when used for political purposes.

Re:I'm conflicted

[Applehu Akbar]

I hate this sort of thing, generally speaking... but bringing down an auto-dialer farm seems like a net plus for humanity.

My vote goes to whoever invents a practical means of killing robocall centers. So should the Nobel Peace Prize.

And by 4chan

[rsilvergun]

is it safe to assume we mean "Russia"?

Morally wrong

[myid]

I voted for Trump, and I hate getting these calls as much as anyone. But disrupting election efforts like this is morally wrong. It's unfair to the party that's getting attacked, and it's an attack against having a free and fair election.

Re:Morally wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

1) It's not a simple "fair or not fair situation". Your reply is pointless.
2) The electoral college distorts the popular vote very little, moreover it reflects the fact that we are the United States of America, not just a big federal government. True to the structure of our government from the beginning, the people of various states vote within themselves, and the states via the electoral finalize the election by representing the votes of the states.
3) If you want to talk about fairness and our government, just look at the Senate. It's completely undemocratic and much more blatant affront to representational democracy, but also a result of the very structure of our country as United States.

Re: Morally wrong

[ichthus]

Maybe someone will answer your question if you ask it in form (grammar and syntax) that makes sense. I read it three times and still don't understand.

Who cares?

[SeaFox]

If you didn't know today was Election Day, and hadn't made up your mind yet, do us all a favor and don't vote.
Seriously. People who might have benefited from these calls are clearly not really making an informed, thought-out decision if they are this out-of-touch.

Nature of Civil Disobedience

[fyngyrz]

You are deliberately breaking the law, deliberately trying to be arrested, to draw attention to what you consider an unjust law.

No. That's civil disobedience with a wholly optional publicity component.

Civil disobedience (in the US) is disobeying a law because your position is that the law is invalid, unethical, immoral or unconstitutional (which in many people's minds is a subset of invalid.)

This may be of interest -- it's a fairly specific discussion of suffering the consequences of the law as it relates to the validity of civil disobedience.