Andrew Anglin

Daily Stormer

January 8, 2015

I’ve been heavily immersed in the cartoon killer crisis, and hadn’t had time to respond to issues with the situation at 8chan.

They are down, due to ddos.

Hotwheels has posted a FAQ.

8chan.co Downtime FAQ

1) How come we got attacked? Aren’t we using CloudFlare anti-DDoS?

CloudFlare only works if the attacker doesn’t know your real server IP. Since it is well known who 8chan.co’s host is, an attack is still possible.

2) When is 8chan.co coming back?

We are doing our best to bring it back, but we are not sure. We are aiming to bring 8chan.co back in the next 12 hours, but that could very easily become 24 or 48.

In the mean time, the following alternate imageboards are still up:

http://711chan.org (no issues that I know of right now, but historically pretty shitty)

http://lainchain.org (strict focus, but should be OK)

http://masterchan.org (Dutch honeypot?, requires accounts, closed source)

http://420chan.org (nazi mods, SJW?)

If 8chan.co is not back in 48 hours, I will bring up a limited version of the site on alternative hosting with only a few boards (/pol/, /v/, /gamergate/, /b/) and no board creation. I am pretty confident it will not come to that, but it would be better to have something up rather than nothing if we know the real site is going to be down for a long time (72 hours – 2 weeks).

3) Who is behind this?

No one knows, and there is no way to know.

Launching a DDoS is a crime, so attackers normally just rent botnets, use stolen credit cards to rent cloud servers, or pay someone in Bitcoin over Tor to do the attack for them to stay anonymous and not risk arrest.

It took LizardSquad attacking Microsoft and Sony for any of them to be arrested. Obviously, someone DDoSing a small community like 8chan.co is very low on the priority list for law enforcement.

Please do not believe rumors on Twitter that it was “Brianna Wu” or “Muslims” or “JIDF”. They are based on nothing and are being spread by people who want Twitter followers and nothing else. I verified it :^)

4) Can’t you just block everybody except CloudFlare in `iptables`?

That doesn’t solve anything. Blocking IPs at a server level does not stop them from using network resources. The internet is purposely engineered this way so that it can be an open platform.

5) What the fuck? Why are internet services so vulnerable to this kind of attack?

8chan.co is not the first imageboard to ever be DDoSed. 4chan has gone down to DDoS many times over the years, as have 420chan, 7chan and 2chan.



http://tanasinn.info/wiki/Complete_History_of_4chan is a good history of 4chan.

In the early 2000’s, even most multi-million dollar corporations were vulnerable. See http://blog.fortinet.com/post/ddos-a-brief-history for a good run down.