Far-right online forum 8chan kicked offline after
protection services are cut
Site was back online Monday morning with a Russian
company enlisted to protect it from DDoS attacks
Kari Paul
in San Francisco
Tue 20 Oct
2020 01.55 BSTLast modified on Tue 20 Oct 2020 02.25 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/oct/19/far-right-online-forum-8chan-loses-internet
The latest
incarnation of the hate-filled online forum 8chan was temporarily kicked off
the internet on Sunday, after a company protecting the site from DDoS attacks
cut its services.
The site,
which is now called 8kun but was formerly known as 8chan, was back online on
Monday morning, security researcher Brian Krebs reported, with a Russian
company freshly enlisted to provide the protection services.
8chan/8kun
is a far-right message board and notorious bastion of hate speech. It’s the
birthplace of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which originated from anonymous
posts made there by a user named ‘Q’ who baselessly claimed the existence of a
secret cabal of pedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking ring.
The site
had been bouncing around to various service providers since internet
infrastructure company Cloudflare booted it off its platform in 2019, amid
reports the forum was used by the suspects in several mass shootings to post
white nationalist manifestos ahead of the attacks.
The latest
8chan version was being kept online by one internet provider, Washington
state-based VanwaTech. The connection between the forum and VanwaTech was first
reported on Twitter by Fredrick Brennan, an American software developer who
helped create 8chan but has since cut ties with it over its hate and violence
and spends time tracking down sites that enable it. .
Unlike
other providers, VanwaTech refused to sever its ties with 8chan/8kun, citing
the protection of free speech, according to Krebs’ report.
But
VamwaTech was working with Oregon-based CNServers LLC to protect 8 chan/8kun
from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and CNServers did bow to the
pressure.
Over the
weekend, CNServers cut ties with VanwaTech and the 254 websites it protected
for the company upon learning about the 8chan ties. A large number of the other
sites dedicated to QAnon were also affected by the outage.
On Monday,
it appeared that VanwaTech had found another protection service to replace
CNServers, the Russia-based ddos-guard.net. 8kun now shares a server with
militant group Hamas and others who have been pushed off mainstream hosting
sites.
The
situation underscores the complex infrastructure that keeps sites such as
8chan/8kun online. CNServers does not directly work for VanwaTech but for
Spartan Host, which routes internet addresses on behalf of VanwaTech. While
Spartan Host and VanwaTech refused to stop hosting 8chan, CNServers was able to
cut ties for all of them.
The founder
of Spartan Host has repeatedly defended his decision to keep 8chan and
affiliated sites online.
“We follow
the ‘law of the land’ when deciding what we allow to be hosted with us, with
some exceptions to things that may cause resource issues etc.,” said Ryan
McCully, Spartan Host’s founder, to Krebs. “Just because we host something, it
doesn’t say anything about [what] we do and don’t support; our opinions don’t
come into hosted content decisions.”
CNServers and VanwaTech did not respond to request for commen
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