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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.
Maybe while John Oliver was telling people to submit their comments to the FCC en masse, some group that didn't want the people's opinion to get through to the FCC simultaneously launched a DDoS attack on their site...it's possible.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC,"
And so it is important to note, as difficult as it has been for legitimate commenters, that the 180,000-plus comments that they have received, as of this writing, are presumably a small fraction of the actual number of people who attempted to comment on the issue.
He didn't think it was perfectly acceptable to spend two billion dollars on a website that hardly ever worked, he expected a working program. It's also exceedingly disingenuous to imply that the money was all spent on the website, that money was spent to stand up the entire damn program, from the website to inter-agency connections to the assholes answering the damn phones.
But hey, you just keep throwing your bullshit around, maybe someone might buy it.
Back on topic, I would like to see some proof that a DDoS occurred before everyone gets on the "OMG THE GUBMENT WAS HAXXORED" bandwagon. Let's not forget that this is EXACTLY what happened in 2014 the last time Oliver asked everyone to go leave comments, and I don't recall anyone classifying that as a DDoS.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
That's the number of people who successfully submitted a comment. If the site was failing, presumably a lot of people attempting to connect were unable to submit a comment, and therefore unable to be counted.
Of course, never attribute to innocent error what can be attributed to malice - maybe the failure of ability to register comments was intentional.
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I take it you never watched these shows. Stewart and Colbert would totally gore a Democrat for hypocrisy. I have watched Oliver less so I don't know about him. As for now the government is entirely Republican controlled (with a majority / control of all three branches), so Democrats are largely irrelevant and I don't really care what about comments about Democrats or what they are doing. They will next be relevant in 2018 when there is an election.