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The Internal Report Proving the FCC Made Up a Cyberattack (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: An investigation carried out by Federal Communication Commission's own inspector general officially refutes controversial claims that a cyberattack was responsible for disrupting the FCC's comment system in May 2017, at the height of the agency's efforts to kill off net neutrality. The investigation also uncovered that FCC officials had provided congressional lawmakers with misleading information regarding conversations between an FCC employee and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's cybercrime task force. A report from the inspector general's office (OIG) released Tuesday afternoon states that the comment system's downtime was likely caused by a combination of "system design issues" and a massive surge in traffic caused when Last Week Tonight host John Oliver directed millions of TV viewers to flood the FCC's website with pro-net neutrality comments.

Investigators were unable to "substantiate the allegations of multiple DDoS attacks" alleged by then-FCC Chief Information Officer David Bray, the report says. "At best, the published reports were the result of a rush to judgment and the failure to conduct analyses needed to identify the true cause of the disruption to system availability." [Here's an excerpt from the report:] "While we identified a small amount of anomalous activity and could not entirely rule out the possibility of individual DoS attempts during the period from May 7 through May 9, 2017, we do not believe this activity resulted in any measurable degradation of system availability given the minuscule scale of the anomalous activity relative to the contemporaneous voluminous viral traffic."
Yesterday, before the report was released, FCC chairman Ajit Pai came clean on the fact that the hack of its comment system last year actually took place. Pai blamed the former chief information officer and the Obama administration for providing "inaccurate information about the incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people."

2 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. I am absolutely outraged... by Phaid · · Score: -1, Troll

    Oh, wait, this took place on the Obama adminstration's watch? Well, down the memory hole with you!

  2. Re:Is this going to change how anyone votes by ckatko · · Score: -1, Troll

    Fun fact: If you think you're the only one (or your side) is the only one that doesn't do that same thing... you're wrong.

    The left and right do the exact same thing. It's biology. Overlook the failures of your own group, while highlighting the failures of the "outgroup." The only difference is, which "group" do you think you're apart of?

    (Kind of like how bible thumpers in the 90's deemed themselves to be the moral arbiters of Hollywood and video games, and now the left are doing the exact same thing except instead of "sinner" it's "misogynst," "racist," and "Nazi". But abstractly it's the same thing. Attempting to ostracizing a member seen as a "threat" to the group.)