Slashdot Mirror
FCC Says It Was Victim of Cyberattack After John Oliver Show (thehill.com)
On Sunday night, John Oliver urged his viewers to visit a website called "GoFCCYourself," which redirects users to a section of the FCC site where people can comment on the net neutrality proceeding. As a result, the FCC's site temporarily crashed. Now, it appears that the FCC is claiming its website has hit by a cyberattack late Sunday night. The Hill reports: "Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos)," FCC chief information officer David Bray said in a statement Monday.
"These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC's comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host." The FCC's comments site went down in 2014 after the first time Oliver rallied his audience in support of net neutrality. In that case, it was widely believed the site went down because of the amount of traffic generated in the wake of Oliver's show. But Bray on Monday said that this recent instance was caused by a cyberattack and not a flood of people trying to give input. "These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC," he said.
Those two things are unrelated. It's perfectly acceptable for a public agency to scale its system to a realistic workload, not for some fluke peak, especially since they're using a cloud provider (where you can run quite a bill).
The real scary thing is that they can't tell the difference between heavy load and a DDOS.
lucm, indeed.
Remember when people used to call this phenomenon Slashdot Effect?
On a more serious note, is the Trump Administration now going to call Slashdot Effect an "attack," and if so, how is this not a sign of them ramping up the authoritarianism?
the FCC is not the same thing as the Trump administration. They are independent and can't have more than 3/5 of their commissioners coming from the same party, and they are nominated for terms longer than the president's.
Doesn't mean they are competent. But it's not Trump.
lucm, indeed.
The FCC isn't saying accusing John Oliver of launching a cyber attack, they're same some third party launched an attack to stop John Oliver's audience from being able to leave comments.
I dare you to look up what they billed the taxpayer for the website and compare it to the workload it can handle. Then let's talk "perfectly acceptable".
I don't know the exact cost, but they actually took action to reduce their IT costs, as required by federal guidelines established under Obama:
https://www.fcc.gov/general/fe...
Basically they're moving all their stuff to the cloud. They already saved millions with that, you can get all the details in their budget review (which is public).
The Commission made a concerted effort to curb the escalating IT operation and maintenance
(O&M) costs back in FY 2014. Prior to FY 2014, the FCC faced ever-increasing costs in operating
and maintaining its aging legacy IT systems. To counter these escalating O&M costs, the FCC IT
team took the first bold step in early September 2015 by physically relocating over 200 different
legacy servers from the FCC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. to a commercially hosted federalcertified
facility located in West Virginia. These servers contained almost 400 different program
applications. By physically relocating these servers to a commercially hosted provider, not only
will O&M costs be reduced, but it will also allow for improved resiliency and a shift of many legacy
applications to the cloud, similar to the Commission’s Consumer Help Desk.
In FY 2014, 86 percent of IT funding was utilized for O&M and only 14 percent was utilized for
development, modernization, and enhancements (DME). Those percentages are expected to change
to 49 percent O&M and 51 percent DME by the end of FY 2017. The savings that will be realized
on the O&M side will be redirected to delivering new capabilities.
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...
To put things in perspective: the entire FCC budget is 380 millions. They have 1800 employees, which already eats about half of that budget. Then there's buildings, power/heating/cooling, furniture, copiers, etc. They're not cheap, but I've worked on project in the private sector where more money that than was wasted on failed ERP initiatives.
lucm, indeed.
Trumps family name was Drumpf and he was bringing light to his Obama birther nonsense.
The FCC, immediately after Mr. Trump's election, cancelled their existing plans and awaited new dirction from Mr Pai. They' were designed to be independent, but aren't.
davecb@spamcop.net
Yes you're right, only 800 million or so was spent on the ACTUAL website.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
but most people on both sides probably get their news from a variety of sources
Not so much. Conservatives are tightly clustered around Fox. Liberals are much more omnivorous.
This result is likely due to Fox prioritizing pandering over accuracy because pandering makes money.
Doesn't mean they are competent. But it's not Trump.
Is that why they are massively backpedaling net neutrality at the behest of their new boss?