http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,64602,00.html By Noah Shachtman Aug. 17, 2004 Online protests targeting GOP websites could turn out to be more than symbolic during this month's Republican National Convention, possibly blocking a critical communications tool for the party. In the past, activists have been able to shut down the website of, say, the World Economic Forum for a few hours. But the impact of such a takedown was nebulous at best: It's hard to argue the organization really suffered from a few-hour lag in posting its press releases online. In this year's presidential race, however, campaign websites have moved beyond the margins. During John Kerry's acceptance speech in Boston last month, for example, his website was visited by 50,000 people an hour, according to comScore Networks, the online traffic-measuring firm. That's a droplet compared to the millions who'll watch the convention on TV. But taking down a campaign website would nevertheless remove a critical tool for reaching the public -- and likely generate a slew of stories in the mainstream media about the crash. So it's no surprise that hardened electronic activists are planning to jam up the servers of GeorgeWBush.com, GOP.com and related websites, once the Republican National Convention gets underway Aug. 29. "We want to bombard (the Republican sites) with so much traffic that nobody can get in," said CrimethInc, a member of the so-called Black Hat Hackers Bloc [1]. It's one of several groups planning to distribute software tools to reload Republican sites over and over again. These FloodNet programs are similar to hackers' distributed denial-of-service attacks, which overwhelm a server with thousands and thousands of simultaneous requests for information. But some activists are condemning the planned attacks, saying they violate the principles of free speech that protesters rely on for their demonstrations. "If you feel that you must shut up someone through intimidation or false accusations or any other method -- you are not relying on the superiority of the truth," The Pull, co-founder of the online political action group Hacktivismo, wrote in an e-mail. "People can not condemn censorship and then embrace it." The point of the electronic demonstrations isn't to take down a site, according to Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, or EDT, which is releasing a FloodNet program of its own. Unlike hackers' denial-of-service attacks, which often hijack computers against their users' will, EDT's JavaScript-based software depends on how many people use the program. "It's a way to let people around the world gather and let their presence be felt," Dominguez said. Not that he would mind if a Republican server just happened to crash along the way. In 2002, at the EDT's direction, 43,000 people flooded the site of the World Economic Forum during its meeting in New York. The organization's website went offline for several hours following the demonstration. The Black Hat Hackers Bloc is hoping to cause a whole lot more trouble when the Republicans start to gather in New York. The groups will be targeting not only GOP computers, but "e-mail, faxes and phones, too," CrimethInc said, as well as unspecified "financial disruption." Officials from the Republican Party and from Computer Horizons, the Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, firm responsible for network services at the GOP convention, did not respond to requests to comment for this article. It's unclear exactly how effective these online actions will be. In an interview, CrimethInc boasted that his associates defaced the website for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or DARE, with a pro-pot-legalization screed, and promised similar strikes against Republican sites. In the past, veteran online activists have called these tactics the "kind of stupidity that gives hacking a bad name." The attacks during the Republican convention may be just the beginning, however. At the Hackers on Planet Earth gathering in New York City, one speaker promised attendees, "You will learn how to infiltrate organizations like the RNC, how to look for and find security holes, and how mischief and mayhem is achieved." [1] http://phil.ist-backup.de/rncelectronic/ _________________________________________ Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable - http://www.osvdb.org/
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