Last week and throughout the weekend, Deflect helped mitigate several DDoS attack bursts against the official Black Lives Matter website. At current estimates over 12,000 bots pounded the website just over 35 million times in 24 hours. An unusual trait of this attack was the prevalence of malicious connections originating from the US. An in-depth analytic report will follow this prima facie bulletin.
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The Black Lives Matter website had already been attacked in May using a similar method of a WordPress Pingback reflective attack and similarly an unusually high percentage of bots from the US.
Despite its intensity, the attack has been successfully contained by Deflect, and the Black Lives Matter website is functional and accessible throughout much of the weekend. Black Lives Matter has released an official statement on this incident together with eQualit.ie, Design Action Collective and May First/People Link:
Keeping a website available when attackers are seeking to take it off-line is essential for many reasons. The most obvious is the importance of protecting the fundamental right to human communication. But the specific targeting that characterizes recent DDOS attacks (on networks supporting reproductive rights, Palestinian rights and the rights of people of color) highlights this type of on-line attack as part of the arsenal being used to quash response and social change movements.
DDOS attacks will increase as our protests and organizing increases and so must our movements’ ability to resist them and stay on-line. The collaborative work that spawned the response to this attack is both an example of this protective effort and yet another step in improving it and making it stronger.
Our organizations work in different areas with different programs but we are united in our commitment to vigorously preserving our movements’ right to communicate and defeating all attempts to curtail that right. Without the ability to communicate freely, we can’t organize and, if we can’t organize, our world can never be truly free.
Read the Statement on the Recent Attacks on Black Lives Matter’s Website.
We are in the process of studying and classifying these attack using Deflect Labs technology and aim to publish the results in our next Deflect Labs report.