While this attack from Ukraine did not overwhelm our defenses nor as far as we can tell, result in timeouts for readers, but it did make the site sluggish, particularly for admin tasks. Our tech guru Dave took additional protective measures.
Dave analyzed the traffic spike and there is no question, based on more granular information about where it came from, that this was an attack. It started not long after we posted Gonzalo Lira Reports Torture in Ukraine Prison, Extortion, Inevitable Conviction with Sentence of 5 to 8 Years in Labor Camp which was on the first page of Google after the story broke.
I wonder if other sites that have reported on the incarceration and torture of Gonzolo Lira have also been under attack. Readers?
31 comments
Comments are closed.
What can we do to help?
Thanks! Circulate this and/or the original post on Lira’s arrest and torture. Whoever is trying this stunt needs to get the message that trying to squash reporting on Lira will have Streisand-effect results of bringing more attention to the story. Linking it on Faceborg and Twitter would help.
Every time I see someone talking about censorship in Russia, I’m going to point them to this post.
When my old blog got hit with a DDOS attack after writing about Israeli apartheid in the mid 2000s, I had to switch server farms (their decision not mine).
Good luck with this. You’ve been attacked by forces within Ukraine now directly. Before they just used their surrogates in the U.S. intelligence community.
Of course, this could easily/might probably be an attack from the US forces operating within Ukraine. It’s very easy to imagine Tory Nuland throwing a Lizzo-like fit over the impossible situation she’s gotten herself into. Be curious to hear if anyone else had some traffic hiccups lately.
Naked Capitalism is the nail that keeps sticking up!
I like that a lot. Maybe the site should consider a Nails column above the Blogroll column with MT, SH, LF, GG, CH and other Big-Gov-annoying reporters (typically in Blogroll) on it.
What’s the saying? “The more flak you’re taking is proof you’re over the target.”
To be honest, I would have expected more attacks coming from the UK. Unless they are routing it through the Ukraine that is. And looking at that map, one of those countries is definitely not like the others.
I don’t believe regular readership would be filtered out, imagine there are a lot of US readers
Who says it’s not coming from UK or anywhere else via a Ukr server farm or server reroute? Games with IP addresses. / ;)
Yes- You can definitely play games with IP addresses, or also, you can create a botnet for DDOS attacks in any country or region, and then trigger it from anywhere else. The botnet could reside in the Ukraine, while the control resides in the US, UK, or anywhere else.
Yep. Even MAC addresses can be spoofed, adding to the fun of trying to trace the origin.
Is that map and graph from Cloudflare?
If a state actor were using its ddos weapons wouldn’t we expect sources to be much more distributed?
I never said this was a state actor or DDoS. The headline pointedly said “from,” not “by” Ukraine.
I know you didn’t. My questions are intended to confirm my understanding.
To your other question, I am pretty sure that chart is not from Cloudflare based on an in-passing remark by our tech guru Dave, but I can’t raise him now to confirm.
Your tech guru likely has tools to sort HTTP requests by various characteristics and to present the results in various ways, including mapping them, as seen above. The task is straightforward and most techies doing this work will perform it routinely.
Of course, it could be provided by Cloudflare or another service provider, but this kind of sorting is basic network security work.
not unexpected, but still sorry to hear about that.
means y’all are doing something right.
im reminded of LATOC…distributed think tank.
we had people on the ground in New Orleans after Katrina…and on the water after Deepwater Horizon…as well as a submersible robot expert for the latter…
totally blew the Historia Offionale to hell.
and then the attacks started.
resident tech guys traced them to, among other places, Reston, Virginia.
site owner ended up apparently having a visitor…scared him, and he suddenly shut the site down…became some kind of herbal healer.
stay safe.
I did my first tweet or x or whatever with the article link. I guess I am (proudly) on some enemy of the state list now?
Thanks a lot!
Thanks for the idea. Good goal for me when I get time to learn that thang. Just shared Roundtable 48 and this link. Whoops, forgot the third one.
Join the club.
I’ve also noticed spikes in nefarious traffic from that part of the world. Fortunately, my site’s spam filter keeps the bad guys out, as does my hosting service.
Stand strong, NC!
If the Ukrainian gangsters think they are so tough then they should move into the Ukrainian Village neighborhood on the north side of Chicago.
From Casablanca , utube.
AWB Casablanca Parts of NY I would not advise you to try to invade
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq0Nbr_WY1s
…Proof you are right over the target!
It’s creepy how Lira’s Kafkaesque journey has been wiped from the American internet. Meanwhile it has been reported by Russian and Hungarian media that he was detained by the “Ukrainian” authorities at the Hungarian border on Wednesday and that he has been incommunicado ever since.
I suppose that the posers in the SBU who returned his documents were looking for excuses to be as far from Russian artillery fire as possible…
Any update from Lira since July 31?
Yes, he was captured by the Ukraine security services. We had that in Links yesterday.
If it’s any consolation; they can’t possibly do that much longer. Though, in light of this precedent, I can’t help but think of Yves’ SIM-card problems. We are at the point where it seems you can simply be turned off, and left without access. Scary stuff. It would be interesting to see a history of ostracism; how societies have dealt with aberrant behavior it can’t suppress with violence. Our technology has enabled unprecedented methods and efficiency in this regard, which solicit, if not demand uncomfortable amendments to our (society’s) ideals.
Can liberalism (in the primitive sense of Rousseau) survive Big Data, the death of privacy, and climate change (ecosystem collapse)? Is liberalism worth preserving? Is it already dead, and we its twitching limbs? *tongue in cheek* Who is John Galt?
If the Ukies can mess with our internet sites and traffic and post all sorts of their hate crap, why can’t we repay the favor?
If you can’t blind ‘em with brilliance, then you baffle ‘em with bullshit! Any spam slingers care to step up to the plate?
Even their online offensives are primitive (and failures).
Next they’ll put us on the Myrotvorets kill list alongside Roger Waters, Elon Musk, Silvio Berlusconi, Assad, Gerhard Schroder, HRW…
ironic, i would not have distributed the Lira story if not for this