14 DAY TRIAL // As many people try to convince the FCC that net neutrality should be kept and protected, including pretty much the whole tech industry, there are also people who are trying to do just the opposite. Helping out that particular cause is also a spam campaign where anti-net neutrality messages are sent to the FCC, flooding the comments section.
The Verge reports that thousands upon thousands of messages were sent to the FCC containing the very same message. "The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama administration imposed on the Internet is smothering inovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation," reads the template used by countless people. The message, it seems, was penned out by a conservative group called the Center for Individual Freedom. They created a form that was supposed to help people send a message to the FCC.
The problem that arose following this step was that someone, whether an individual or a group, started using people's data to fill out the form over and over again. The Verge reports that there are many indicators that the information comes from the River City Media database that contained some 1.4 billion personal information records, a case which we reported about a couple of months ago.
Fake comments
When questioned about sending out the message to the FCC, people who signed the form with name and address had no recollection of ever sending it; not to mention that the verbiage wasn't something they'd use.
That's quite likely due to the fact that the data was picked up from the leaked database. Chris Vickery, the researcher who discovered the RCM data leak back in March, admits that it's quite curious that out of the addresses that were checked randomly on Have I Been Pwned, only Special K and the RCM list were matches for every email. Special K is another spam dump, although it encompassed a much smaller list of individuals.
The entire situation is rather odd as multiple things happened at the same time. On the one hand, John Oliver urged people to send the FCC comments asking them to protect net neutrality. Then, the spam campaign began, flooding the agency's website. On top of it all, the FCC claims that a DDoS attack took place Sunday to Monday night, taking down the commission's comment section.
Vickery has offered the FCC the full RCM database to compare the information and weed out all fraudulent comments, but no comment has been made so far on this matter.