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re:publica 17 - All Sessions Podcast
History of DDoS: from digital civil disobedience to online censorship (en)

History of DDoS: from digital civil disobedience to online censorship (en)

re:publica 17 - All Sessions vor 9 Jahren

Deflect has been at the forefront protecting human rights and independent media organizations from Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks. We will give a brief history of DDoS, from digital civil disobedience, to inter-state aggression, retaliatory hacker

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29:12

Floriana Pagano, Donncha O Cearbhaill During this session we will
offer a short history of DDoS – from the Zapatistas’ use of
Floodnet and the “Netstrikes” and “Virtual Sit-Ins” at the turn of
the millennium, to Anonymous’ campaigns and political actions
against Estonia, Georgia and Ukraine, up to more recent and
disruptive episodes like the attacks against Krebs on Security and
Dyn. A description of 3 case studies reported by Deflect Labs in
2016 – targeting an independent news site in Ukraine, the website
of the Palestinian global campaign BDS Movement and the official
website of Black Lives Matter – will illustrate how DDoS is being
used by governments, local authorities and hacker crews alike to
censor critical voices online. Beyond the hype generated by Mirai
and other software for managing botnets, launching a DDoS attack is
becoming easier and cheaper by the day, and the risk of a
“democratization of online censorship”, as Brian Krebs has called
it, is growing. Even if websites of independent media and civil
society organizations can be protected by free DDoS mitigation
infrastructures like Deflect.ca, the protection measures these
services can offer have their limits, and it’s important to explore
solutions based on community action. This session will aim at
starting a conversation with groups that are particularly
vulnerable to DDoS attacks, to find common ground in solidarity
against the threat of DDoS-based censorship. How big are the risks?
What are our needs before, during and after the attacks? How can we
defend ourselves and band together to do so more effectively?
During the second part of the session the public will be invited to
share their experiences of DDoS attacks, those at risk of attack to
discuss their needs, and those in a position to help to consider
how we can collaborate. The purpose of this session is to gather
information on our community’s needs and capabilities and to start
developing standards for threat-intelligence sharing among peers
and participants of re:publica.