Scammer attack against 419 eater

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Not quite a Newb Joined: 04 Aug 2005 Posts: 65

I am an old member but have been away for a while, I heard there was some sort of lad retaliation against this site last year. Is there some info posted or can someone fill me in?
I tried the search function and found nothing.....

Thanks

Baiting Guru Joined: 17 Sep 2006 Posts: 5905

As far as I am aware they tried to Flash Mob the site and we were down for quite a while.

Whether the tech guys found a way of stopping them doing this or once they realised we weren't going to go away they gave up I am not sure but things have been back to normal for a while now *touchwood.*

Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 9:05 am

I believe he is talking about the DDOS attacks.

Try using that as a search query.

I found this and a few others

http://forum.419eater.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=146147&highlight=ddos+attack

Baiting Guru Joined: 17 Sep 2006 Posts: 5905

^^^

DDOS! That is the one! I knew Flash Mob wasn't quite the right word I was looking for.

Not quite a Newb Joined: 17 Jun 2007 Posts: 37

These things are so easy to launch and, like the 419 scams themselves, cost next to nothing to get underway. Scammers using an Internet cafe probably wouldn't be able to launch an atttack like this, unless the entire cafe's users were in on it. A group using computers from their homes would be a different story.

Entire packages of DDoS software can be found online. The best defense is to prepare for them ahead of time by assuming that somebody, someday, might want to take your site down. Simply assuming that the scammers are a bunch of uneducated goons who don't have enough brain cells to even think of something like this is to set yourself up for a hard fall.

I am assuming that, after the last attack, this site is well-protected.

What could cause a problem is if a large enough group of scammers were to download the needed programs and have the knowledge to use them properly, they could organize themselves enough to set-aside a particular time and date on which to launch the attack. Then, on D-Day, multiple computers would launch their assault at the same time and keep it going non-stop.

The result would be a crashed site, expended bandwidth and higher financial costs to restore the site.

There are some Internet users who crash sites just for the hell of it. Others takedown sites with which they have personal issues with (e.g. racist websites) and take them down as a show of opposition. White nationalist Hal Turner got hit by the group Anonymous for this reason.

An attack launched by the "Just for the Hell of It Crowd" is unlikely, due to the widespread dislike of 419 scammers. In other words, they hate them more than they might hate you, if they hate you at all. There could be no ideological reason to attack 419eater and I have seen no word of any such attack to be launched against this or any other baiting site. In fact, 419eater is mentioned on one of their sites, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and scambaiting is not attacked per se.

So, future DDoS attacks are not likely to occur unless the scammers get organized. I do think that 419eater being attacked might set-off a war launched against the scammers either in retaliation or just for the LULZ.

Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 1:59 pm

I never take my tin hat off just in case.... Smile

Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 2:41 pm

DDoS attacks are frequently just paid for from a botnet herder, and there's little you can so about it in that case, other than wait for it to vanish and have a contingency plan. It won't be a gang of lads in a cafe, their combined bandwidth puts them all in contention with one another anyway Wink

Not quite a Newb Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 41

It wasn't lads, but Vlads - they also attacked AA419 at the same time.

Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 3:26 pm

Apart from making the system 'harder' it's not hard to work out how to function as normal, so the attack had no great effect on the work we do, other than to make a lot of baiters increase their efforts to close down fake sites.

It also caused other unrelated sites to band together and pool resources, such as Castle Cops who are, alas no longer with us.

You can't underestimate the damage these people can do, as they did take down the whole of one of the Baltic states internet, but on the flip side, they will get some very serious people, in dark glasses, using high tehnology to locate and award them very long periods in jail.

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