Anonymous parent-site 4Chan hit by DDoS

The irony is not lost on anyone

The recent string of DDoS attacks against high profile companies like Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal continues.  The latest victim: 4Chan, the message board group populated by anonymous users.  Those familiar with the more public DDoS attacks against PayPal and others will recognize the group as the very bosom from which spawned the group Anonymous (so called because when a user posts on 4Chan, his/her name comes up as “anonymous”), which claimed responsibility for the DDoS attacks earlier this month.

Irony much?

The site’s founder, Christopher Poole (who goes by the pseudonym Moot) posted on the site’s blog at 2:39 am Tuesday morning: “Site is down due to DDoS. We now join the ranks of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, et al.--an exclusive club!”

To recap: a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack occurs when hundreds of thousands of computers are used to send more packets of information to a website than it can handle, consequently crippling it. 

While 4Chan’s message boards were down Tuesday morning, they appeared to be working again by late Tuesday evening.  The source of the attacks (the mastermind?) remains a mystery, but that wasn’t the case when 4Chan’s users attacked PayPal, Visa, and others earlier this month.

The attacks came in response to the companies’ removal of support for WikiLeaks, the whistle-blower site at the center of a whirlwind of controversy when it released over 250,000 diplomatic cables last month.  PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard all refused to process payments for WikiLeaks, which solicited donations for the upkeep of its operations through PayPal.

Additionally, the site was hit with an attack (a DDoS attack?) that made it impossible for visitors to access the cables, prompting the company to switch over to a server hosted by Amazon (which has invested so heavily in its infrastructure that it has server capacity to spare and rents out to other companies).  But WikiLeaks wasn’t long with Amazon—it promptly got the boot, which spurred Anonymous to rally its forces to attack the popular e-retailer.  The attack failed, as Amazon is a force to be reckoned with and has dedicated a great deal of energy to beefing up its infrastructure to ensure that its site can handle overloads of information requests from gluttonous consumers.

Anonymous issued a pseudo-press release in early December, explaining that the attack was not foiled; the group simply changed its mind.  But the DDoS attacks appeared to fizzle off and the group hasn’t made waves since.

So who could be at the root of the attack against 4Chan?  So far the culprit hasn’t claimed responsibility for the attack, but at any rate, the site is back up and running now.

Image source: 4chan.org