A fake report on CNN's iReport site alleged that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson had been found dead.
(Credit: iReport, screengrab from Business Insider)Reports began to surface Sunday charging that AT&T had blocked broadband access to parts of the notorious (and powerful) Internet forum site 4chan, which the telecom company confirmed on Monday. Late in the evening, a fake story surfaced on CNN's iReport citizen journalism site alleging that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson had been "found dead in his multimillion dollar beachfront mansion" after a cocaine overdose.
Suffice it to say that the two events are likely connected. Access to 4chan has since been restored for AT&T broadband customers.
For those who stepped in late: 4chan is sort of like the Internet's equivalent of a league of pirates, den of thieves, or whatever other sort of anarchic analogy you prefer. Decentralized and relying on anonymity, the participants issue large-scale pranks both online and offline, from teaming up with video site eBaumsWorld to launch the "Porn Day" campaign on YouTube to spamming Twitter's trending topics.
The fake iReport disappeared from CNN quickly, perhaps because it read that Stephenson was found "delirious" when "a friend called 911 after a night of what he called, 'male dancers everywhere and the best blow west of the Mississippi.'"
Last October, iReport was the victim of a prank in which a more believable user-submitted story reported that Apple CEO Steve Jobs--who has a well-publicized history of health problems--had suffered a heart attack. It wasn't true, but it was online long enough that Apple's stock took a dip.
AT&T spokesman Michael Coe told CNET News in an e-mailed statement that a denial-of-service attack was what stemmed the temporary block of 4chan traffic and that it has since been restored. "Beginning Friday, an AT&T customer was impacted by a denial-of-service attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org," Coe wrote. "To prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and to prevent the attack from spreading to impact our other customers, AT&T temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our customers. This action was in no way related to the content at img.4chan.org; our focus was on protecting our customers from malicious traffic."
"Overnight Sunday, after we determined the denial-of-service threat no longer existed, AT&T removed the block on the IP addresses in question," the AT&T statement continued. "We will continue to monitor for denial-of-service activity and any malicious traffic to protect our customers."
This post was updated at 9:25 a.m. PT.
Update: Twitter has reacted to this raid by removing the term from its trending topics, but evidence can still be found on Twitter Search.
Twitter saw a huge influx of fake accounts on Sunday, pushing the NSFW trending topic, #gorillapenis, all the way to the top of the list. Popular image board 4chan /b/, along with other various sites, appears to be behind this latest raid on Twitter. 4chan, a hub of Internet culture and memes, has long been the spawning point of various raids on sites, most recently YouTube Porn Day. Before that, they were responsible for hacking Time Magazine's voting system for the World's Most Influential Person, making the site's creator, moot, the winner by a wide margin.
A set of instructions for the raid on Twitter.
(Credit: Insurgency Wiki)They are calling this latest effort "Operation Shitter." As you can see in the instruction set image, the blame is trying to be laid on Ebaum's World, which is, as far as we can tell, not involved in the raid. Blaming things on Ebaum's World is sort of a tradition on 4chan. A wiki (with information now pulled) was also formed to give instructions on how to systematically game Twitter's trending topics. The wiki suggests that raiders use a script, written by them, to spam the hashtag.
A similar NSFW trending topic on the subject of Mollie Sugden also sprung up recently after her death. While I'm not for censoring people by any means, when attacks like this pop up, Twitter has to have a better detection mechanism in place, ready to deal with it, especially as Twitter gets more and more mainstream attention.
It could have been swastikas again.
(Credit: Matt Hickey)Twitter can be described as a hive mind. It's a real-time collective consciousness of its users. Some of those users are Oprah and Shaq. And many, many others are members of Anonymous, the loose-knit group of Internet do-gooders, pranksters, demons, and troublemakers who have famously taken on Scientology, hacked Sarah Palin's e-mail account, and saved a troubled cat named Dusty from his abusive owners.
(Credit:
4chan)
Last month, Anonymous, via the dark recesses of its general Web HQ 4chan, invaded Time magazine's "World's Most Influential Person" to nominate--and then elect--4chan's founder "moot" as the title holder.
A few months before that the group invaded a message board dedicated to Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly, who then famously called them an "extremist far-left Internet hate group." Shortly after, it used the same tactics to troll Oprah into saying things they wanted her to on her show.
Now they're doing it again, using Twitter to promote their "queen," a teen YouTube sensation known as Boxxy, to a trending topic. A glance at Twitter's trending topics shows #boxxy at the bottom of the list, having just appeared.
Oh, great. Boxxy.
(Credit: Matt Hickey)As the Twitter bomb has just started, we can expect that to rise. It's not harmful and is really more of an interesting experiment in gaming systems, but it can get worse. The 4chan members of Anonymous are known for hate speech just for the sake of upsetting people, so if this is a successful troll, something truly troubling might be on the horizon.
Not that 4chan doesn't do some good. Indeed, the site is where things like Rickrolling, lolcats, and many other memes we see every day come from. In the end, they're in it "for the lulz" (laughing at someone else's expense over the Internet), and hopefully that's all this is.
Editor's note: Under no circumstances can we recommend visiting 4chan. It will melt your brain, make you angry, and get you fired. And it might violate certain court orders.
(Credit:
Topherchris.com)
Some nasty pranksters, likely associated with Web forum 4Chan, have hacked into Apple gossip mainstay MacRumors' live-blog coverage of Tuesday's Macworld keynote. Hosted on a separate domain, MacRumorsLive.com, the site was plagued by offensive messages about Apple CEO Steve Jobs' health and general inanity (i.e. "SEX ME") before finally succumbing to "technical difficulties."
It remains uncertain whether the pranksters actually brought down the site, or whether MacRumors voluntarily took it down to keep things under control.
It's pretty clear, however, that this was the work of 4Chan, which has gained both respect and notoriety (depending on who you ask) over the past year for its persistent protests against the controversial Scientology sect in the form of an offshoot group called "Anonymous."
Over on 4Chan's labyrinthine forums, a couple of threads (warning: contains explicit language) hint at members' collusion to take down MacRumors Live, and the hacked live blog was peppered with declarations of "4CHAN FTW" (that's "for the win," for those who stepped in late).
This year's Macworld Expo has gained particular attention because Apple has announced that it's the last in which it will have a presence. Additionally, iconic CEO Steve Jobs bowed out of the keynote presentation. took his place.
The 4Chan skulduggery appears to have first been noticed by Twitter users and independent blogs like Topherchris.com, which took the screenshot above.
One Twitter user pointed to rumors on social-news site Digg that 4Chan members had been circulating MacRumors passwords on Monday night.
It's a silly prank, yes. But it could have a big impact on MacRumors: this is likely the site's biggest day of the year, and the event could have an impact on both ad revenues and server costs.
UPDATE: It's not totally clear who's actually responsible for this attack. We've been getting a handful of e-mails indicating that it may have been a non-4chan group called Myg0t that was using the 4chan forums to organize, and another e-mail claimed credit on behalf of another forum community, Ebaumsworld. Indeed, screenshots show that one of the hacker messages read, "We are from Ebaumsworld. We are hackers on steroids."
Honestly? The world may never know.
This post was updated at 2:13 p.m. PT.
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