Digg Used To Facilitate DDoS Attack
Thursday, December 28, 2006
15 hours ago (at the time of posting) a "story" was submitted to digg.com. But unlike most stories this one didn't intend on providing useful information, Breaking news or a funny video. the intention of this story was to initiate a DDoS attack against the site godhatesfags.com by using the digg comminuty as a botnet.The user egingras posted this story entitled "Make GodHatesFags pay for their bandwidth" with the description "It's time to stop this shit. Feel free to use as much bandwidth as possible. Try downloading a few podcasts."
The story then rapidly received many diggs, 2139 at the time of this post, And soon found it's way onto the front page, At which point digg users started posting links to audio files in comments and soon knocked godhatesfags.com offline.
having a site which gets "slasdotted" or becomes a victim of the "digg effect" is usually a webmasters wet dream. it means a lot of people want to see something you have made or written. But when these usually innocent effects are done to facilitate criminal damage it becomes a different issue. It becomes illegal.
I am surprised, And angry, That digg should allow their site to be used in such a malicious and criminal way. the intent from the very beginning was obviously to knock the website offline by sending it many thousands of visitors, Which is, For all intents and purposes, A DDoS attack.
