ANC website attack: Afrihost responds

MWHAHAHAHA @ Innocent clients may be affected.

@Beachless - Yes they are guilty of lots of things.
 
Passerby • 7 minutes ago −
I will have to reconsider using Afrihost, after hearing of this. Not because of security issues; rather, because they are hosting the anc website and are assisting in getting it back up.
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I don't like the ANC, I disagree with their political views, but someone has to host them... I won't tell Afrihost to go screw itself just because they indirectly host the website on their network...
 
froot said:
I don't like the ANC, I disagree with their political views, but someone has to host them... I won't tell Afrihost to go screw itself just because they indirectly host the website on their network...
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I just hoping that everone will have the same mature view. Would not be to surprised if someone is now calling for a stupid boikot of Afrihost. Do not kill the messenger.
 
froot said:
I don't like the ANC, I disagree with their political views, but someone has to host them... I won't tell Afrihost to go screw itself just because they indirectly host the website on their network...
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Not with them personally but I agree. As long as everything is above board then they are entitled to service whomever.
 
the fact is that Afrihost operates a hosting service for companies; one of these companies hosts for the ANC.
VC, MTN, CellC, MTN, Neotel all have customers who are tied to the ANC, DA, FF+ and organized crime.
A breakdown on who provides hosting, content etc ... for the different political parties would be an interesting bit of trivia - especially if there are instances of shared providers.
 
As we've said, this is a very regrettable incident. The impact of DOS attacks is generally not limited to the target server, and should this particular attack have gone further, all our hosted clients could have been at risk. That is emails, business and e-commerce sites, and other vital services for many clients.

We don't support or denounce any political party or movement, and we support anyone's right to express their own views without attacking or persecuting others for theirs.
 
AfriMan said:
As we've said, this is a very regrettable incident. The impact of DOS attacks is generally not limited to the target server, and should this particular attack have gone further, all our hosted clients could have been at risk. That is emails, business and e-commerce sites, and other vital services for many clients.

We don't support or denounce any political party or movement, and we support anyone's right to express their own views without attacking or persecuting others for theirs.
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Pretty sure you are still happy taking the ANC's money though? I would tell them to find other hosts.

EDIT: Apologies, made comment before reading the story. I would still look at taking uwembi off your client list if they are going to be targets for network attacks, surely this is in your set of rules?
 
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DOS/DDoS attacks sucks.

Everybody's affected in one way or the other by these.

Those ne'er-do-wells responsible can focus their destructive energies somewhere else rather.
 
is there any SLA implications which can be disclosed at this stage? Surely a website being down because of a deliberate attack as a result of "deliberate sabotage" falls outside of the scope of "down time" for any service level agreement. It would be unfair for Uwembi or Afrihost or IS (I suspect the hosting is in an IS datacentre) to experience penalties on a downtime of a client because of the activities of the client and a criminal vandalism, but it would also be a dangerous precedent for an exception to be cast in wide terms.

Of course the best solution would be for all involved to waiver any claims and any money that should be paid out to go to charity ... but that is the idealist in me.
 
Fudzy said:
Pretty sure you are still happy taking the ANC's money though? I would tell them to find other hosts.

EDIT: Apologies, made comment before reading the story. I would still look at taking uwembi off your client list if they are going to be targets for network attacks, surely this is in your set of rules?
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We can't terminate a client's services for their political affiliations or clients. If they violated our AUP in any way, that would be a different matter. If a random person decides that they are going to DOS your server, for their own reasons, it may not necessarily be sufficient reason to terminate a client's service. What we see on a daily basis are malicious attacks on private servers, gaming servers (from other rival gaming hosts) and all manner of unpleasantries that come with the anonymity of the internet.
 
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DDoS/DOS is about the lamest form of "hacking" ever.
 
Paul Hjul said:
is there any SLA implications which can be disclosed at this stage? Surely a website being down because of a deliberate attack as a result of "deliberate sabotage" falls outside of the scope of "down time" for any service level agreement. It would be unfair for Uwembi or Afrihost or IS (I suspect the hosting is in an IS datacentre) to experience penalties on a downtime of a client because of the activities of the client and a criminal vandalism, but it would also be a dangerous precedent for an exception to be cast in wide terms.

Of course the best solution would be for all involved to waiver any claims and any money that should be paid out to go to charity ... but that is the idealist in me.
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It's very difficult to award compensation or assign blame in these situations. While some hosting activities do border on being offensive or attracting unwanted elements, like Cyber Bullying or rival Gaming Hosts, a DOS attack can be launched for literally any reason. Essentially the DOS attacker may dislike the site, the person, the party, or may choose to cause as much chaos as possible to bring attention to themselves. Tweeting about a DOS attack beforehand does kind of hint at the latter. IT's very difficult to know whether the recipient can be held directly responsible for someone else's malicious intent, particularly when that person is doing so anonymously and there is no way of tracing the dispute between the two parties.
 
It is really petty to complain about the fact that AH renders service to the ANC. I am not going to stop buying groceries at Checkers because they also have clients with different political persuasion or stop buying cars from Toyota because ...

As long as the client pays for the service everything is in order. :)
 
@Afriman

So, if I understand you correctly, u basically saying that a DoS attack can have negative effects on other customers sites as well.

It's safe to assume that the ANC site is a risk right now, although they are a paying customer and Afrihost does not have affiliatons and so forth...

Now for your other customers who are also paying clients and running businesses like myself on dedicated servers and rely on a 99.9% uptime from your company, how are we to feel that you are hosting this website fully knowing the potential risks involved for further attacks that might inevitably disrupt our service.

It does not mean that because they (ANC) are paying customers and its "NOT THEIR FAULT" that a group targets them that your others customer must face a potential downtime.

I for one are tired of the pathetic service I receive from your India customer service office and now know that you will further risk my service by hosting a website that is a disaster waiting to happen is downright reckless.

I give up...
 
I don't think the ANC poses a specific risk to the network and they really shouldn't
Yesterday was a newspaper, today a political party, tomorrow might be a business which has an office in Zimbabwe or the dating service which failed to provide an escort for the script kiddies. It would be disingenuous for the ANC however to claim that Afrihost or the content provider did not live up to an SLA.
 
I'm sure that alot of ISP's have clients that are a pottential risk right. Its business, emotions and opinions don't count for a damn, its all about making money in this day and age.
 
Twista said:
@Afriman

So, if I understand you correctly, u basically saying that a DoS attack can have negative effects on other customers sites as well.

It's safe to assume that the ANC site is a risk right now, although they are a paying customer and Afrihost does not have affiliatons and so forth...

Now for your other customers who are also paying clients and running businesses like myself on dedicated servers and rely on a 99.9% uptime from your company, how are we to feel that you are hosting this website fully knowing the potential risks involved for further attacks that might inevitably disrupt our service.

It does not mean that because they (ANC) are paying customers and its "NOT THEIR FAULT" that a group targets them that your others customer must face a potential downtime.

I for one are tired of the pathetic service I receive from your India customer service office and now know that you will further risk my service by hosting a website that is a disaster waiting to happen is downright reckless.

I give up...
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I think the blame (and energies) here are misdirected. There is a perpetrator and a victim in this scenario, and as far as we are concerned, the client never violated our AUP or did anything which would cause us to terminate his services.

ANYONE can be a victim of a DOS attack, because people think it's cool, or exciting or want to make some kind of public example. We have systems in place to identify these issues and neutralise them quickly to protect the network. But this is a reality of the internet environment. Someone could read your post on a forum, or a tweet you made and decide, that's it - you're their next target.

So as I said, instead of blaming the victim, let's rather examine how we feel about the perpetrator's behaviour. He does have a twitter account after all :)
 
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