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

[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

[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.

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.

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.