Maverick Jester
The Special One
haha thin end of a wedge
Ah... I see... very nice...
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Ah... I see... very nice...
The way I see it this is not a freedom of speech issue. IOL is not attacked every time there is an article someone doesn't like. This is a once off statement that is made. IOL can still publish what they want but it was made clear to them that they must also be willing to live with the consequences of their choices. If an article is one-sided propaganda by a dictator then IOL should not publish it. The editor must refuse to publish "political ads" for ZANU-PF and must not do so for any other oppressor anywhere. Surely the editor is there to guard a newspaper from doing exactly this. So I have no problem with what was done here and I think it should happen more to get editors to think about what they do. It is not taking away freedom of the press but rather a call to clean up their act and get better at doing their frikkin jobs. Garbage should not be forced down the public's throats in a Stalinist/Fascist fashion.
racer
Senior Member
having now had a chance to actually see the article in question, i can see how some might interpret it as being ZANU-PF propoganda. What everyone is missing here, is that the Independant published TWO articles about Zimbabwe that day, both of which were re-published on IOL. I believe it is a newspaper's responsibility to publish opposing views, and it is our respnsibility to read both and make up our own minds.
What happened today was therefor not only censorship, but censorship under false pretences. Making us believe that IOL were advertising Mugabe without mentioning the opposing article that was also on the site (and linked to from the article in question nogal).
Okay, so when a paedophile is caught there must be at least two stories in the newspaper, one from a Police statement, and one from the paedophile to even things out? Or do we rather accept that paedophilia, like the scandalous oppression of millions, is just plain wrong?
Mugabe is not hero but a criminal. He doesn't deserve his position stated in such flowery terms. He deserves to be ridiculed and put on trial for his crimes against humanity.
crackersa
Honorary Master
thanks for pointing this out! you know what the problem is here, people can't be bothered to read the article and do further checks.
think about it, anon is just script kiddies, you think they have the intelligence to really look into this? they are no one, real men show their faces when they are protesting. at least Cosatu is public, who is this scared little kid?
MagicDude4Eva
Banned
Are the F5s nowadays heuristic/proactive or do you have to implement/turn on iRules in order to block the traffic?
Maverick Jester
The Special One
They do it automatically. One of their main aims is to protect against zero-day attacks, so they need to be heuristically implemented.
It's stranger,
I never would've thought I'd "see" a hacker or part of a hacker group "out in the open" like normal it's just a hack with a home screen saying the name of the hacker or group and their message,and they stay hidden in the dark side of the internet,
never thought I'd see one chatting in a forum...
But its cool
Nice work anonafrica
I never would've thought I'd "see" a hacker or part of a hacker group "out in the open" like normal it's just a hack with a home screen saying the name of the hacker or group and their message,and they stay hidden in the dark side of the internet,
never thought I'd see one chatting in a forum...
But its cool
Nice work anonafrica
Statement from IOL
Independent Newspapers today came under attack from an organisation that claimed it did it because of the media group’s alleged support of Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe.
The attack led to Independent Newspaper’s internet and e-mail systems going down at 11am. According to IOL editor Alastair Otter, the system crashed because of a denial of service (DoS) attack, an attack in which servers are flooded by a huge volume of traffic. The volume of the traffic slows down the servers and, in the worst cases, effectively shuts down the website.
Just before the attack, a group calling themselves Anonymous Africa, with the Twitter handle @Zim4thewin, sent out this tweet: “Please note everyone. Today #IOL will be attacked for ignoring the genocide against the Ndebele people and for supporting a dictator.”
Minutes later they wrote: “@IOL Tick tock 3 minutes left until the African spring tidal wave hits your corrupt mouthpiece.” The tweets then counted down to 11am, when they wrote: “@iol You are now tango down! for crimes against humanity!”
Then came the taunt: “IOL bad boys bad boys what you ganna do, what you ganna do when they come for you,” quoting the Inner Circle song.
The website and related services were restored by around 1pm.
"As a news organisation that includes more than a dozen newspapers as well online properties we publish a range of opinions, including some that may not be popular," said Otter. "Publishing these does not imply that we agree, or disagree, with those views. We pride ourselves on allowing and publishing a multiplicity of views. It is unfortunate that anyone could use this simple principle of media as an excuse for an attack on us."
Source: http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/hackers-attack-iol-1.1531273#.UbhshvkweKU
Independent Newspapers today came under attack from an organisation that claimed it did it because of the media group’s alleged support of Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe.
The attack led to Independent Newspaper’s internet and e-mail systems going down at 11am. According to IOL editor Alastair Otter, the system crashed because of a denial of service (DoS) attack, an attack in which servers are flooded by a huge volume of traffic. The volume of the traffic slows down the servers and, in the worst cases, effectively shuts down the website.
Just before the attack, a group calling themselves Anonymous Africa, with the Twitter handle @Zim4thewin, sent out this tweet: “Please note everyone. Today #IOL will be attacked for ignoring the genocide against the Ndebele people and for supporting a dictator.”
Minutes later they wrote: “@IOL Tick tock 3 minutes left until the African spring tidal wave hits your corrupt mouthpiece.” The tweets then counted down to 11am, when they wrote: “@iol You are now tango down! for crimes against humanity!”
Then came the taunt: “IOL bad boys bad boys what you ganna do, what you ganna do when they come for you,” quoting the Inner Circle song.
The website and related services were restored by around 1pm.
"As a news organisation that includes more than a dozen newspapers as well online properties we publish a range of opinions, including some that may not be popular," said Otter. "Publishing these does not imply that we agree, or disagree, with those views. We pride ourselves on allowing and publishing a multiplicity of views. It is unfortunate that anyone could use this simple principle of media as an excuse for an attack on us."
Source: http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/hackers-attack-iol-1.1531273#.UbhshvkweKU
MagicDude4Eva
Banned
Interesting - does your setup then contain F5 AFM in front of LTM's or do you just use the AFM's for DDoS. I always thought of the F5 more to be a IPS than a DDOS (such as a Radware) appliance. Could you actually see the mitigation of the device or were you never hit yet?
Maverick Jester
The Special One
We actually don't use the AFM module on our network. Use separate firewalls for this, more due to them already being there than anything else, and that they fall under the standard as defined by our security patterns.
So the LTM's are positioned elsewhere on our network.
As for their effectiveness- given the purposes that we procured the different F5 devices to perform, we are seeing massive benefits, yes. Not particularly in terms of DDoS prevention, but we have not had any attacks breach our network.
marine1
Honorary Master
They are back up, would be interesting to see if they would be interesting to see if they report on it
Edit saw RPM posted an article.
Edit saw RPM posted an article.
MagicDude4Eva
Banned
Okay - the various threads seem to imply that the F5 was efficient in DoS and DDoS protection. I have only had F5 exposure several years back where the LTM was really a "traffic optimiser" (compression, loadbalancer, QoS etc) and was surprised to see that the F5s are advertising DDoS protection now. Just out of curiosity I was wondering if anyone had handson experience with that since F5 does not necessarily feature as a high-end DDoS device.
I would have placed a DDoS appliance at the edge of the network to cover all aspects of security. The firewalls are really not built for that purpose. Then again, Internet Solutions edge network protection is just shoddy (and I think most other hosting companies are possibly slightly better off).
BTW: In my opinion it should have been the hosting provider's fault (IS) to protect customers like IOL - it is amazing that IS lets DDoS traverse across it's core network and knock customers off the grid.
If anybody has access to IS client portal, you'll see an outage reported on an Outsourced Firewall in rosebank, the outage was reported at 11:29 (29mins after the attack started) and it was resolved 13:06,
I presume the firewall went into safemode and shut down after it started receiving the DoS attack.
also a quick look up on iol.co.za their provider is IS. so this has to be linked...
I presume the firewall went into safemode and shut down after it started receiving the DoS attack.
also a quick look up on iol.co.za their provider is IS. so this has to be linked...
AlphaBravo
Expert Member
I wonder of anything was proved, or if anything will change after this attack. I doubt it.
MagicDude4Eva
Banned
My sentiments exactly - IS shared FW is really a piece of junk - incident was reported at 11:07 and I would think the DoS attack knocked off part of the firewall. Surprising that it had not taken out more customers during the 1 hour. AFAIK the shared FW in Rosebank was knocked off, but I understand that IOL is hosting in Bryanston so it could be unrelated or a knock-on from the attack when IS tried to switch firewalls (but I might be wrong on this)
ToxicBunny
Oi! Leave me out of this...
So IOL uses some shared infrastructure with other companies because they host at IS?
See, that makes me even more against what these muppets did today... they have potentially harmed more than just IOL, and achieved nothing for it.
See, that makes me even more against what these muppets did today... they have potentially harmed more than just IOL, and achieved nothing for it.
racer
Senior Member
Whether he deserves to be ridiculed and put on trial for his crimes is not the issue here. There are obviously people who believe he's doing a good job in Zimbabwe, and its MY RIGHT to read those opinions and then form my own. Your beliefs are irrelevant to that. If we're going to approve of terrorist censorship on articles we don't want to see published, where exactly do we draw the line?
Yes, Sorry it was reported 11:07
I feel its definitely linked, it could've been a secondary FW or a FW linking the pop(in Rosebank) to Bryanston server where the site is hosted. if the traffic hit Bryanston first(before the Rosebank firewall) then it could've been a different story.
Point is, anonafrica managed to accomplish their mission in bringing down IOL,
whether or not any other site was brought down together with IOL we'll have to wait and see.
Does not seem like they/them/it/he/she responded to this question. It would have been interesting to see the response.
