14 DAY TRIAL // The Federal Communications Commission is being accused by defenders of Net neutrality that they are lying about the site's comments' section going down due to a DDoS attack. Under these circumstances, the FCC refuses to release evidence of the alleged attack.
FCC chief information officer David Bray told ZDNet that the agency would not release the logs, in part because they contain private information, such as IP addresses. He did mention, however, that the attack amounted to about 1 gigabyte per hour.
According to Bray, the FCC staff noticed a high volume of incoming comments hours after John Oliver's show aired, the show in which he was once more asking viewers to comment in support of net neutrality. The log files the FCC has supposedly show bots submitting a large number of comments, which sparked a large uptick in Internet traffic on the FCC website.
A sort of DDoS
The FCC admits, however, that this wasn't a traditional distributed denial of service attack, mentioning that the high number of comments from these bots prevented others from commenting too.
This seems to be related to the anti-net neutrality spammers who used data from the River City Media leaked database, which contained some 1.4 billion records, to post hundreds of thousands of the same messages to the FCC website. People who had been signed on the FCC site had no recollection of ever posting that message to the board.
The FCC, however, plans to take into consideration all these messages that oppose net neutrality, even if they came from bots, probably because it suits their agenda of killing off net neutrality. After all, the thousands upon thousands of messages from net neutrality supporters didn't matter, nor did the opinions of most of the tech industry in the United States. Ajit Pai, the new FCC chief, has made it clear over the years that he opposes these protections and finds them useless and even damaging to the way Internet companies operate.