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.

Comments

Maybe they WERE attacked.

[GameboyRMH]

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.

Re:Maybe they WERE attacked.

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't the FCC claim there was a cyber attack so they don't have to accept any massive public outcry, that may have also conveniently overwhelmed their system?

Re:The Federal Communications Commission

[kelarius]

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.