AT&T. Layer 6-8 needed.

Mon Jul 27 22:23:04 UTC 2009

Corporate PR staffs don't generally work on Sunday, but when AT&T came into
the office today they drafted this statement:

http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800&cdvn=news&newsarticleid=26970 

"Beginning Friday, an AT&T customer was impacted by a denial-of-service
attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org. To prevent
this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and to
prevent the attack from spreading to impact our other customers, AT&T
temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our
customers. This action was in no way related to the content at
img.4chan.org; our focus was on protecting our customers from malicious
traffic.

"Overnight Sunday, after we determined the denial-of-service threat no
longer existed, AT&T removed the block on the IP addresses in question. We
will continue to monitor for denial-of-service activity and any malicious
traffic to protect our customers.

"Here's more (http://budurl.com/DDoSVideo) on AT&T's efforts to prevent
denial-of-service attacks."

There's obviously a history of DOS attacks to and from 4chan and the
membership over the years, some of it quite righteous. The "Anonymous"
attacks against the  Cult of Scientology, for example, were very sweet. But
all you have to do is read the status page that moot posts on 4chan to
realize that they've been the target of a counter-attack for past three
weeks or so.

Richard Bennett

-----Original Message-----
From: Seth Mattinen [mailto:sethm at rollernet.us] 
Sent: Monday, July 27, 2009 3:00 PM
To: 'nanog - n. am. network ops group list'
Subject: Re: AT&T. Layer 6-8 needed.

Richard Bennett wrote:
> 
> In the case of the ISPs and carriers who blocked access to 4chan for a 
> while Sunday, since that was done in accordance with DDOS mitigation, 
> there's not any issue as far as the FCC is concerned, but that hasn't 
> prevented the usual parties from complaining about censorship, etc.
> 

If someone came out and said "Hey, DDOS mitigation, please hold!" that would
be cool, too. Based on the content of 4chan, it's either DDOS or someone
cried about the content. It looked like the latter.

~Seth