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Democrats Ask FBI To Probe Reported FCC Cyberattack (thehill.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: A group of Democratic senators is asking the FBI to investigate an alleged cyberattack on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) website earlier this month. In a letter to acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe sent Wednesday, the senators asked the bureau to "investigate the source" of the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. "Any cyberattack on a federal network is very serious," Democratic Sens. Brian Schatz (Hawaii), Al Franken (Minn.), Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Ed Markey (Mass.), and Ron Wyden (Ore.) wrote. "This particular attack may have denied the American people the opportunity to contribute to what is supposed to be a fair and transparent process, which in turn may call into question the integrity of the FCC's rulemaking proceedings," they wrote. In the Wednesday letter to McCabe, the senators asked to be briefed by the FBI on the matter by June 23. "We ask that the FBI prioritize this matter and investigate the source of this attack," they wrote. On May 8, the FCC claimed that it was a victim of "multiple" DDoS attacks. The alleged attacks occurred after comedian John Oliver spurred millions of Americans to file comments with the FCC in favor of net neutrality. "Many had attributed the website's slowdown to the volume of comments produced by Oliver's segment, but the FCC instead blamed malicious actors days later," reports The Hill.
Help! All those citizens with opinions are attacking us with their words.
Remember the Stratfor hack?
If you are hacked the FBI are the ones to ask, especially the question "was it one of your informants doing the hacking" and "did you know about the hack"?
The FBI will release a statement indicating that "evidence suggests" a DDoS attack but with no actionable evidence indicating who was behind it or what the motives were and that no further investigation is possible.
Really, nothing will change except that these Senators will be have talking points for a press conference or their next speech to voters about their affirmative stance on network neutrality.
Considering that there was a huge stream of anti-NN comments, many of which came in the names of people who are actually dead, something is off. But hey, let's dismiss their claims without any investigation because we can study the text and provenance of those comments without even looking at a database dump. We're awesome like that!
The FBI may not have the best skills at cyber forensics, but they clearly have the legal authorities to investigate a crime such as what the FCC alleged. They do also have access to other expertise beyond that of their agents, as well.
As to whether I'd trust them to do it? The FBI has a certain tribal mentality, and doesn't take kindly to being told not to investigate, or worse to quash an ongoing investigation for political reasons. There's a reason that Assistant Director Mark Felt became Deep Throat - it had nothing to do with his political affiliation, and everything to do with his taking offense at the Nixon patsy of a Director telling them to call off their investigation. That said, I don't know that I disagree with your suggestion that the FBI needs to made more independent of the executive branch. I might even go so far as to suggest the independence of the rest of the DoJ should be considered.
Why are people getting their news from John Oliver? If he is so concerned about the US then why, even after being married to a former US solider, is he still under green card residency? Nothing say you care about a country more that having a status of "I kinda want to live there, make money there, raise my kid there, but I can cut and run if it all becomes too much for me to deal with."
It can take months or years to get US citizenship from a green card. A friend of mine had his green card for 8 years before he finally got citizenship. I'm not saying that is Oliver's situation, but it can take a while.
Completely agree. Adding that the posts likely came from the DCI Group ( https://www.dcigroup.com/ ) and that this was amateur hour on their part for not factoring in how hard they were hitting the FCC server.