Europe News, a joint Danish-German news and opinion aggregating service, suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack yesterday initiated by Turkish hackers, temporarily incapacitating their site.It may be that the above link is not working. That’s because the Europe News site was brought down entirely during the night. Since then service to it has been restored intermittently, but it’s not back to full operations yet.
Henrik, who runs the English-language half of Europe news, sent me this account of recent events:
Turkish nationalist hackers attack Islam-critical blogs- - - - - - - - -
The leading Islam-critical news aggregator EuropeNews has been attacked and knocked off the Internet, along with Politically Incorrect and several other blogs. Yesterday, February 7th, we faced a botnet attack out of Russia, which overloaded and crippled our servers. We weathered that by blocking the IP addresses involved. Today, February 8th at 13:50 CET, our server was knocked out entirely. Right now, 15:45, we are online again.
We do not know yet what exactly has happened. A Turkish hacker team by name of AyYildiz Team (Crescent and Star Team) has attacked and defaced roughly a hundred German sites. More information on Earth Times. The group, according to Netcraft, moves to a fresh server every few months. Part of their ethos is to never attack any Turkish web sites.
The attack seems to be motivated by a fire in Ludwigshafen, Germany, in a house inhabited by Turkish families. The fire had wide publicity, not least by a sensational rescue of a baby falling down four stories. The fire brigade is reported to have done a great job at the scene, but nonetheless nine persons succumbed to the rapid fire in the century-old building.
The fire, however, has escalated to a diplomatic crisis between Germany and Turkey, as claims of arson have been thrown around, nothing proven. (ABC News report; Guardian report. More details in this Spiegel report.)
Unsurprisingly, the Turkish government is exploiting the event to the max. Zaman reports, like every other Turkish media.
The latest assumption about the cause of the fire is that it may be due to tinkering with the electrical installations. From Fact — Fiction blog (German).
False accusations of racist hate attacks constitute blood libel.
Revenge through Internet attacks will be publicized as widely as possible, and dealt with to the full extent of the law. We will not give in to assorted Turkish bullying.
16 comments:
Baron
The "tinkering with the electrical installations" is Newspeak. This seems to be about stealing electrical power by wiring you appartment to the incoming power cable BEFORE the counter of the power company.
Source ARD (state TV) news yesterday.
See my update!
"The "tinkering with the electrical installations" is Newspeak."
Actually, it's meant to be something slightly different, an euphemism.
That's something I use to leave an obvious conclusion up to the reader, so as to make that conclusion his own, not something pushed on him from the outside.
It's a sublte art, for sure.
Henrik
I did not mean to accuse YOU of Newspeak. But the "Spiegel" for instance reports "amateur electrical installation" today. And that is surely not a euphemism.
"That's something I use to leave an obvious conclusion up to the reader, so as to make that conclusion his own, not something pushed on him from the outside. It's a sublte art"
Hey, you will forgive me for not catching subtleties. You know how literal us Krauts are ...
Reports within the last few weeks:
Finnish blogger shut down
Lionheart threatened with arrest for blogging
SIOE Netherlands shut down by the WordPress thought control police
Europe News hacked by Turks.
Yet, Samir Khan sits in his little cubby hole in N Carolina rejoicing in the deaths of Tennesee tornado victims without impediment.
http://revival.muslimpad.com/
2008/02/07/all-praises-and-thanks-to-be-to-allah-tornadoes-devastate-the-land-of-the-crusaders/
What's wrong with this picture?
An entire people, possessed by a 7th century ideology and the emotional disposition of a toddler, armed with the best modern technology the Western world can produce.
Here's another hair-rising example the Middle Eastern mentality:
A microscopic speck of marijuana, the size of a grain of sugar, and invisible to the naked eye? That's four years in an Emirati prison.
- Sodra
Update:
We're running, barely, not well at all.
The DDoS attack was not much of a problem, once we figured out what happened and got the right IP addresses blocked. We were back in full at 23:00 CET last evening, and running full steam until 13:50, when we dropped dead.
Now we're online again, but there seems to be some sort of corruption preventing articles from loading. That's not good, not at all.
We're working to get to the bottom of this, of course, and are hoping to gather enough evidence to take it to the police.
Update 2:
Things seem to change minute to minute. We're certainly not out of the woods. Now we're getting database errors.
Politically Incorrect misloads with this message:
This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.
We're trying to get to the log files in order to figure out what the **** has hit us.
The Speigel article says:
"The Turkish ambassador criticized Beck's rash denial of a political and criminal connection, and Ankara sent a team of its own investigators and a state minister to the site of the blaze in Ludwigshafen."
This is one of those quiet little facts that is quiet like a goose walking across your grave.
Note that a fire, which is GOING to happen with some measure of regularity anywhere on earth, is immediately a matter of state for a Muslim nation because Muslims are involved. Six Americans just died in a sugar factory explosion. Can we expect Turkish experts there as well just to make sure all is on the up and up?
Granted, Western experts many times go overseas, as did Scotland Yard for the Bhutto investigation, but that is ENTIRELY about technolgy and expertise, and happens ONLY when the host government asks.
Did Germany "ask" for these Turkish experts? (Did they "ask" out of cowardice, when Turkey "asked" them to ask, the way Don Corleone "asks" for a favor?)
This Turkish involvment has absolutley nothing to do with investigatory expertise, and everything to do with a Muslim nations "rights" where Muslims are concerned, no matter where on planet earth they may be.
Forgive a possible violation of Godwin's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law), but wasn't there a German leader once who made a huge issue of Germany's obligations to protect "Germans" outside Germany's borders, no matter WHERE they might be? Where did that road lead again?
The small event of this fire is the kind of brick in the road toward civil war that so many have spoken of, that is, the political (international?!?!?) reaction to it is. It is a violation of the reasoning behind the 350 year old Peace of Westphalia that largely ended religious (if not political) wars in Europe. And now the multi-cultis and contemptable idiots like the Archbishop of Canterbury are prepared to throw all of it over the side and hope for the best, largely out of cowardice and fear of "offending". (and fear it is)
How much courage does a polite "thanks for the offer, Turkey, but this is a German matter" take? More than the grovelling, craven, and cowardly Western political classes are capable of, apparently.
druu222, you're absolutely right about looking at this aspect. I also find it deeply respectless and I think the German government should have refused - politely/firmly/stubbornly - to have Turkey intervene in these matters.
I've posted my comments on this at EuropeNews, which for the moment is alive and kicking - faster than ever :)
Expect some downtime, though. We'll be doing some server shuffling.
Henrik - I read your article. As we say in my parts, "You da man!"
Let's hope there are more of you.
(A joint press conference with Merkl and Erdogan over a small fire in a town the size of Tulsa, Oklahoma? Jesus Wept.)
How about some revenge anyone? From what I remember there were some Swedish computer technical wizards who struck back last time the Turks got out of control in cyberspace.
I phoned the number given for customer service for my computer once, and the person I spoke to was in Turkey....I won't ever phone again. ....makes one wonder...
"How about some revenge anyone?"
'Success is the most profound revenge'.
Seriously, we're back in good shape, and our traffic counters are ticking. Even bad stuff doesn't get us down.
And for revenge, well... I'm not so good at hacking other people's servers. Actually, I don't even know anyone who knows hot to build a botnet or do DDoS attacks.
I can write articles, post articles, e-mail articles.
Hmmm... I just may have an idea...
Henrik,
I've been posting your updates here.
Please keep me up to date on what you find out. There may be various legal ways of going after Ay Yildiz - you might check with Rusty at Jawa Report on that. You have my email; let me know what else I can do to help.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant - if the rest of the world knows what to be on the lookout for, then there is a better chance of apprehending the perps and putting a stop to this.
Thanks, 1389. Interestingly, the whole thing is turning into a considerable gain for EuropeNews, as our visitor count is better than ever. In spite of 7 hours of downtime, we were close to beating our record of 1500 unique visitors on a day.
Also other blogs are picking up my articles, so far Cyprus Forum and The Malaysian. That's neat :)
Unfortunately I have a routing problem and can't reach EN myself at the moment. This seems completely unrelated to the hacker attack.
We didn't analyze the exact cause yet.
Related, Politically Incorrect will now be forced to change servers. It has grown so large that it starves other blogs (Big Pharaoh and more) on the same server, and now the webmaster takes action on this.
EuropeNews will move to a completely different server in a weeks' time.
Thanks for the support, we're turning bad into good over this!
Henrik,
EuropeNews also made it onto Malaysia Today, Malaysia's most popular political web site.
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