A couple weeks ago Michelle Malkin had a post about being attacked by “cyberjihadis”. This is what she said about it:
I greatly appreciated all the blogosphere’s support when the cyberjihadis took down my site down over the Mohammed Cartoons. If you’re down, please send me an e-mail and I’ll keep a list here of all those affected. We are all affected by cyberterrorist tactics, wherever they may originate.
Glenn Reynolds had posted on his blog that the attack originated in Saudi Arabia:
HOSTING MATTERS IS DOWN as the result of a DOS attack. They’re working on it. The only other thing I know is that it originates in Saudi Arabia. I’ll be posting here until it’s fixed.
Then updated with this:
UPDATE: Rand Simberg emails, correctly, that originating in Saudi Arabia doesn’t actually mean that the perpetrators are Saudis — just the computers they’ve hijacked. True enough.
The update is very true. Anyone with some computer knowledge knows it is easy to find proxies from anywhere in the world. When you are doing attacks on web servers then you need a simple web proxy which are in an even greater abundance than Socks proxies.
Today I found this article which could shed some light on the attack that took down all these blogs:
Blue Security CEO Eran Reshef said in an interview with Wired News that his anti-spam company would close its doors, as the attacks against his company impacted sites beyond Blue Security’s.
The TypePad blogging service and thousands of other websites and mail servers hosted by Tucows felt the effects of massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks launched by the Russian spammer known as PharmaMaster. Those attacks began in early May and took down Blue Security’s sites.
Then the attacks spread to TypePad after Blue Security rerouted traffic to an old blog it had on that service. Tucows CEO Elliot Noss said in the report the massive attack utilized so many attacking hosts that 70 percent of the IP addresses being used for the DDoS were unique.
Further information can also be found here:
The Blue Frog fight with a Russian spammer claimed an innocent bystander. TypePad and other sites operated by Six Apart came under attack from a sophisticated DDoS, the company posted on its blog.
Michael Sippey wrote in that entry how Six Apart was being affected by the DDoS, which began on May 2nd:
Since approximately 4:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time, Six Apart has been the victim of a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack. This has affected all of Six Apart’s sites, causing intermittent and limited availability for TypePad, LiveJournal, TypeKey, sixapart.com, movabletype.org and movabletype.com.
After nearly twelve hours, Six Apart finally sounded the “all clear” and set their network status back to green. However, it appears Six Apart never should have been victimized in the first place.
Going through the list of blogs affected that Michelle had posted it appears that most of them run off of the Typepad family of software. Also they appear to all be through the same hosting company and since the date of their attack also coincides with the date of the Blue Frog attack it would appear to be one in the same.
In other words, this was not because of Muslims upset over the posting of the Mohammed cartoon – it was some Russian hacker who had an axe to grind with the Israeli owned Blue Frog. They were just innocent victims in a cyber war.