Amazon outage: Anonymous 4chan WikiLeaks DDoS or hardware fail?

By Richi Jennings. December 13, 2010.

Was yesterday's European Amazon outage caused by a DDoS or a hardware failure? Did the 4chan.org Anonymous army bring down the web sites for 30 minutes in revenge for WikiLeaks, or is there a less sinister explanation? In IT Blogwatch, bloggers wonder who to believe.

Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention The Julian Assange backlash begins...
(AMZN)

Michel Rose, Georgina Prodhan, and Alexandria Sage tag-team:

Amazon was among the first U.S. firms to pull the plug on WikiLeaks since it began publishing thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables. ... A loose grouping of activists operating under the name "Anonymous" had urged an online attack to crash the amazon.com site.
...
Amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, amazon.fr and amazon.es were all down for more than 30 minutes ... Sunday night. ... "The brief interruption ... earlier today was due to hardware failure in our European datacenter network and not the result of a DDOS attempt," [said] a spokeswoman.

Charles Arthur grauni-adds:

On Saturday, a statement apparently on behalf of Anonymous said it had changed its strategy and would now focus on spreading snippets of the leaked cables far and wide rather than on cyber attacks.
...
Neither the blog site that Anonymous had been using for its public statements nor the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chat channel that organisers had been using [is] available.

But Anonymous tweets this rebuttal:

Let's be clear: WE DO NOT LEAVE ANY STRATEGY. WE ARE ADDING A NEW ONE, JUST THAT.

Nick Farrell tends to believe Amazon:

Amazon has a fairly strong cloud structure so taking it down would have required a concerted attack. ... If the attack has anything to do with Anonymous then it would probably be a breakaway group that feels more proactive action is needed.
...
A successful series of attacks was countered by ... Right-Wing American hackers who feel that Wikileaks is ... designed to bring down the glorious US empire which was appointed by God to rule the world. ... "Operation Fightback" took out Anonymous's software ... which launches attacks from an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel. Operation Fightback disabled the IRC channel.

However, John Kennedy fears "a powder keg waiting to go off":

Last week, I don’t know what surprised the western world more, the detention of ... Julian Assange ... for alleged offences in Sweden when everyone knows it’s just a holding action for eventual extradition to the US, or the speed and rapidity in which cyber strike forces organised themselves and struck ... at leading websites in protest.
...
[The] arrest of Assange ... awoke people from their slumber or their ... faith in legal systems actually protecting free speech. The world was already a cynical place ... now the blindfolds are off the rest of us. If governments want you, they will get you.

But Liam Fox offers this rant:

Only days after the unjust arrest of Julian Assange, while Mr. Assange still sits in a jail facing nefarious and seemingly trumped-up charges ... Operation Payback is a bust. It has defined itself as a joke. ... Our governments are still doing everything they can, with the assistance of private corporations, to deny us our freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
...
The would-be revolutionaries seem to retreat from a strategy of meaningful offence to one of sophomoric annoyance. ... Someone needs to take their tools and actually use them. Send the children to their room and get some meaningful work done.

Meanwhile, this anon describes the next phase of "the game":

We have already made it very clear that we will fight for Freedom of Speech and a free press. ... When the game changes, so too must our strategies. We are now moving forward to phase two of our war on disinformation-terror, introducing: Operation LeakSpin.
...
We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not Forgive.
We do not Forget.

 
And Finally...
The Julian Assange backlash begins
 
 
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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, you can follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be richij's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: itbw@richij.com.

You can also read Richi's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.