"Renting attack capacity from [cloudflare]" is inaccurate as I understand things. That group hosts their site behind cloudflare but I have not seen anyone claim that cloudflare's infra is used for the attacks.
This whole article seems conflate hosting an informational site run by the attackers and hosting the attack itself.
In The Before Times, there were very few problematic DDOS operations because... they would all DDOS one another offline. Websites, control infrastructure, anything.
DDOS protection services were provided by companies like Akamai; call for pricing, big companies only, absolutely no anonymous sign-ups.
Cloudflare revolutionised the industry by providing free DDOS protection to anyone, including DDOS-for-hire services. Preventing them from DDOSing one another offline really let the DDOS industry take flight.
It's been a well known story around Cloudflare from the beginning that they protect booters and other cybercrime actors just like any other (paying or non-paying) customer.
If you report the DDoS-for-hire actors that offer their services on forums where such things are offered openly, they reply with a template that freely interpreted say something along the lines that they can do nothing and who is a crimininal is .. like, just your opinion, man (checks notes) they say here they are a legit load tester operation, so nothing really we can do.
You can say they entered the scene because DDoS exploded in popularity, but you could just as easily make the argument it was the other way around. Make of that what you will but they sure made a lot of money from the same booters they protect their customers from.
> It's been a well known story around Cloudflare from the beginning that they protect booters and other cybercrime actors just like any other (paying or non-paying) customer.
Yep it's been talked about on HN for over a decade at least. There's a specific post I was looking for from 2011 or so but you can see from 2014 [1] it was well talked about.
So "big companies only, absolutely no anonymous sign-ups" should be the only ones able to put stuff on the internet without fearing that a random teenager can take your site offline for days just because they're bored?
How? Their sign-up flow would have to change dramatically. It might even become a process that is internally "expensive". There is likely one or more managers in charge of this decision and they don't want it. Additionally the current universe rewards the current situation (for them)
This is called KYC and is a standard part of operating a financial service. Seems to me like it should be part of internet infrastructure services as well. And, I thought, in some cases already is?
... and financial services companies huge and small still go out of their way to help their clients move money around in a myriad of ways, because it's very lucrative and there are so many loopholes and ways to obscure things. Offloading the responsibilities of law enforcement and regulatory bodies to private companies makes things worse for everybody. Providing non-crime services to criminals should not be a crime any more than selling a candy bar to a criminal is. As long as you aren't actively aiding or covering up for a crime, not reporting criminal activity is not even a crime in many areas, and if KYC can effectively identify criminals, law enforcement should be able to do it themselves.
Plausible deniability is all they really need. Asking companies not to make money in very likely to be legal ways will never work. If these people are really doing illegal business in plain sight it should be easy for law enforcement to catch them.
I have no insight into this particular case/incident, but I do have to deal with a lot of http traffic management, and I've lately been seeing Cloudflare IPs show up a lot more often in my logs for probes and nuisances, and not because the traffic is being proxied (or at least, it doesn't have the CF-Connecting-Ip header).
Used for these attacks, dunno, used for some attacks, yes. (But CF still remains a much less frequent nuisance than pretty much any other infrastructure provider.)
One of types of services Cloudflare provides goes by the name "Warp". Calling it a VPN is only wrong in ways that don't really matter — it has the effect of causing client traffic to appear to originate from a different IP address to the one they're notionally connected to the Internet via.
people will always be able to pick a handful of sites they think shouldnt be allowed to use cloudflare hosting services. the problem is that every person will have a different handful of sites. cloudflare should host everything and anything unless and until a lawful order is received.
if they start sticking their fingers into sites and determining whether the site's content is "appropriate" or whatever, based on some sort of nebulous set of criteria, people will get (justifiably) big mad about it, guaranteed.
the "renting attack capacity [from cloudflare]" should have some evidence behind it, because as far as i am aware, the attackers are not using cloudflare infrastructure for the actual attack.
(its really jarring to see the general sentiment on this submission vs. the general sentiment on google submissions)
you are heartened to see people advocate for cloudflare to start proactively and arbitrarily deciding who can host legal content, instead of being content-neutral?
their size and the "man-in-the-middle"-ing is a huge problem. however, i dont think the solution is to encourage them to also start acting as content police.
i dont trust cloudflare, which is exactly why i dont want them policing my legal content. you want the "malicious actor" to exercise more control?
Most companies have TOS that include not damaging or attacking the company itself. The advertised service attacks Cloudflare explicitly. It seems very straightforward that this would violate any reasonable TOS.
As a condition of your use of the Websites and Online Services, you will not use the Websites or Online Services for any purpose that is unlawful or prohibited by these Terms. You may not use the Websites or Online Services in any manner that could damage, disable, overburden, disrupt or impair any Cloudflare servers or APIs, or any networks connected to any Cloudflare server or APIs, or that could interfere with any other party's use and enjoyment of any Websites or Online Services. You may not transmit any viruses, worms, defects, Trojan horses, or any items of a destructive nature through your use of Websites or Online Services. You may not exceed or circumvent, or try to exceed or circumvent, limitations on the Websites or Online Services, including on any API calls, or otherwise use the Websites or Online Services in a manner that violates any Cloudflare documentation or user manuals. You may not attempt to gain unauthorized access to any Websites or Online Services, other accounts, computer systems, or networks connected to any Cloudflare server or to any of the Websites or Online Services through hacking, password mining, or any other means. You may not obtain or attempt to obtain any materials or information through any means not intentionally made available through the Websites or Online Services. You may not to use the Websites or Online Services in any way that violates any applicable federal, state, local, or international law or regulation (including, without limitation, any laws regarding the export of data or software to and from the US or other countries).
Cloudflare retains the right (but not the obligation) to block content from its Distributed Web Gateway that Cloudflare determines (in its sole discretion) to be illegal, harmful, or in violation of these Terms. For these purposes, illegal or harmful content includes but is not limited to: (a) content containing, promoting, or facilitating child sexual exploitation and abuse or human trafficking; (b) content that infringes on another person’s intellectual property rights or is otherwise unlawful; (c) content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence, or is intended to defraud the public; and (d) content that seeks to distribute malware, facilitate phishing, or otherwise constitutes technical abuse."
cloudflare is not hosting the infrastructure doing the actual attacks. the attack is coming from residential proxy servers, not from the webpage being hosted by cloudflare, which is just a marketing page and a login portal. that clause is not really applicable.
in any case, its not a question of whether cloudflare can remove a website. of course they can, for whatever reason they want.
its a question of whether we want to be in a world where cloudflare starts making content-based decisions on website hosting. most people probably dont want that.
> the webpage being hosted by cloudflare, which is just a marketing page and a login portal
thus being used for illegal and harmful activities right?
> Cloudflare retains the right (but not the obligation) to block content from its Distributed Web Gateway that Cloudflare determines (in its sole discretion) to be illegal, harmful
Not that I have any hope for TOS violation claims. I've learned early on in life that people generally don't care in life if you violate rules they invented if they're not impacted themselves. They do care if they violate someone else's rules and there is a chance of repercussions. There are exceptions, quite a few hosting companies in fact, but Cloudflare so far hasn't acted like a party that has the good of the web in its interest (even when strictly speaking of whom they offer services to despite them doing harm). Just wanted to point out that the cited clause, assuming it is correct as stated above, could be applied at Cloudflare's discretion if they so wished
>thus being used for illegal and harmful activities right?
neither the login portal page nor the marketing page are illegal.
>Cloudflare so far hasn't acted like a party that has the good of the web in its interest
for a lot of reasons, i generally agree with this statement. however, for this specific reason (maintaining a content-neutral approach, instead of playing content-police), i could not disagree more. cloudflare making hosting decisions based on the legal content of your site would be a huge disservice to the internet.
Wait, the webpage hosted by cloudflare, as you say. So yes, they're not hosting the infrastructure doing the actual attacks, they're "just" hosting the infrastructure for the site advertising the attacks.
"You may not use the services to attack our infrastructure. You may use the services to advertise and charge for attacking our infrastructure".
correct, you should be able to host any lawful website you want.
if a police investigation turns up that X DDoS is linked to Y advertising site, the police should then submit a lawful takedown request, which cloudflare will oblige.
One of the few reasonable comments on this thread.
I don’t see how cloudflare could have prevented this at all. Even if they took down the info site of the attackers they could just host it on GitHub pages, or a million other free static site hosters.
Zero evidence that cloudflare actually enabled the attack itself from what I can tell.
Cloudflare enables this because their stance is that they are a neutral carrier who is not responsible for the data they carry. If I send an abuse report to github for content on their system, there is a chance that I will be annoyed by how they handle it.
Cloudflare's core thing OTOH is to hide who I could be sending an abuse report to,
Possibly they will forward it ( more likely not) , but they will include my personal information in a report to an entity that is unknown to me, who are likely criminals, exposing me to danger.
>if they start sticking their fingers into sites and determining whether the site's content is "appropriate" or whatever
They already pick and choose. They have not decided to sit outside of it. Any claim about them not getting involved should be read as tacit approval. Because we know they will drop users they sufficiently disapprove of.
Articles like these seem to hold a weird belief that Cloudflare does not react to security reports or legal orders? From my experience, they react appropriately and relatively quickly compared to rest of the industry.
Could Cloudflare be more proactive or add more friction to their signups? Yes, probably, but the reasons they have outlined for not playing internet police make sense to me.
I don't think it should be a requirement to provide your credit card, phone number and a copy of your ID in order to host content on the internet...
The internet worked for so long because people responsible for each little island did what was for the most part in the best interests of the rest of the islands. If you didn't, other islands would shut off their links to you. Law enforcement was a last resort because 1. the courts don't move at the speed of the internet and 2. nobody wanted the internet getting top down governmental regulation because it was trans-national.
Cloudflare spent a bunch of venture capital to give away expensive things for free and buy market share. If you convince all the grocery stores to move to your island, you can operate a den of criminal activity with no fear of everyone else shunning you.
Talk to anyone who fights botnets, malware, or online scams. Once you hit the Cloudflare dead end you just have to give up. Law enforcement isn't going to take up a case where only 7,000 peoples computers are infected, and Cloudflare isn't going to investigate and take action themselves.
I do fight botnets, malware and scams. Criminals flock to any service where they can spread their stuff and appear legitimate. Google, Facebook, Vercel, Netlify, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft, OVH, etc. In my experience, Cloudflare is not any more or less of a dead end than any of the other providers, there are some others in that list who deserve being called out a lot more.
Yes, Cloudflare has always been really shitty and automated at responding to abuse reports, and because they are the front-end connection, it is impossible to pursue the report against the 'real' host unless Cloudflare is willing to provide you with information about where that host is: which they won't typically do, even if you are a fellow infrastructure provider. It's been several years, so maybe they have gotten better, but I would be surprised.
Oh absolutely agreed. Cloudflare becoming a giant internet chokepoint is certainly a real problem. It would be a much better world where ddos protection would not be a needed service or where we it was provided as a public service, rather than by private companies. However, that's not the world we live in.
How did you get that from the comment? It’s the other way around - if you report criminal or illegal sites hosted by cloudflare they will take it down.
I’ve hosted content online for decades and never once talked to cloudflare.
Will they? Have you gone through that process with them? In my experience (admittedly somewhat stale) it was fairly hard to get through to them, much less to get the information required to actually report bad actors to their real hosting provider that Cloudflare is fronting.
I once came across a website hosting extremely inappropriate content while surfing the web. I discovered that this website was using Cloudflare for DDoS protection and other purposes. I had a bit of a look online and found out how to submit a complaint to Cloudflare. On that form, I was asked for my email address and no other personal details, if I remember correctly. On the very same day, I received an email confirming that my complaint had been accepted and was under review - presumably an automated response. It was already quite late, so I went to sleep.
And just a few hours later, I received a letter informing that the information about the website in question had been forwarded to the relevant authorities, as well as to the website’s hosting provider. To be honest, I didn’t read that second email until the next day (I was sleeping), and it seems the website's hosting provider acted quickly (or the site owners decided to cover their tracks), because when I went to that website to check how it is going, it was no longer active, no longer existed at all. It just was gone. That was about six months ago.
So... I won’t speak for others’ experiences, but in this particular case, they reacted quickly and quite effectively. Perhaps other people have had different experiences.
Cloudflare & AWS wouldn't even INVESTIGATE a abuse report I sent because there weren't any "infringing URLs" or "specific resources".
I provided enough evidence for them to at least be able to kickstart a internal investigation or even CONTACT the abusive customer, which they did not do.
If it were a stresser, all they would see is a login panel. It's not like these sites are publicly advertising what they're doing...
That's not a "weird belief". Cloudflare positions itself as "infrastructure". That means they think they are not responsible for the content that they carry.
In a normal scenario, if you want to protect your systems from other "bad" systems on the internet, you can block them on the IP layer.
But Cloudflare operates at the IP layer proxying data between you and good and bad (and everything in between) systems.
In a normal situation you could block and report a site that is run by the the mob, by either blocking them at the IP level or by contacting the abuse@ of the organization that is hosting the content.
Cloudflare is making it so that you can't do either. And if you send an abuse report to Cloudflare, you cannot be sure that they will not just forward your contact information directly to the entity that you are complaining about. They have changed their stance over the years to appear more responsible, but the fact remains:
If I want to send an abuse@ report to a system that is hidden behind Cloudflare I can not be sure that they won't just forward it without me knowing who they are forwarding it to.
I dislike CFs role in the modern Internet as much as the next person, but this is a bunch of speculation trying to connect dots with no basis other than that a Canonical cert renewal happened on the same day as a company transfer.
There might be somewhat of a tangential story, however, in that Njalla seems to have reorganized or changed ownership fairly recently[1], and that Njalla and immateriali.sm seem to be related entities[2]
The article puts it very succinctly: Cloudflare fronts attackers for free and bills the victims for relief.
Ddos protection services can be cast as a digital protection racket where they have a perverse incentive to keep attackers attacking. “It's a dangerous internet out there; you'd better pay us to protect your website from the attackers using our free tier.” At the least, even if there is no active collusion or profit sharing or anything like that, there is not a clear side that the DDos protector service is on?
I do agree with your comment. But obviously Cloudflare didn't invent DDoS. If Cloudflare just magically disappears tomorrow, the AI crawlers won't stop. So what's the alternative? It's not a world you need to upload a government-issued ID to browse the internet, right? ...right?
That doesn't get rid of the important perverse incentives. They still "want" DDoS all over from a monetary perspective. Kicking off the web page of the attackers will have a slight impact but not a whole lot.
The thing is, you can control a neighborhood, a country etc. from attackers and establish control over violence.
How can we do that, if we would like to preserve relative anonymity and global nature of the internet?
People can indeed form cooperatives to handle the protection, but this is hard to manage globally as an entity. DDoS protection is done by primarily having too much capacity to tank it and then filter it. The required investment is rather high.
You can’t have both ‘sockpuppet-grade anonymity’ and ‘held liable for their actions’ in the same society, whether Internet or otherwise. Both in reality and online, those that create sockpuppet corporations-slash-identities are unmasked only when their web of sockpuppetry is pierced by e.g. ‘reused a mailbox’, ‘used a neighbor’s identity’, ‘used a family member’s identity’, and so on. Until such investigations, sockpuppets get away with billions of dollars-slash-gigabits of crimes every year, and barring the ever-incompetence of most criminals, the Internet is a vast improvement over shell corporations in that regard. Still. It is technically possible to be able to ban the controlling human of an online sockpuppet without violating their anonymity, but we lack the societal infrastructure to do so — and since our own techno-utopian societies have invested no effort in doing so, it seems like the core utopian ideal could be ‘freedom from consequences’, rather than ‘freedom of anonymity’. If that’s a valid interpretation, then the core issue is not ‘preserve relative anonymity’, it is ‘preserve relative non-liability’, which may offer new avenues for much cheaper investment than pseudoanonymity would cost.
This seems like one of those cases where you need to assign responsibilities and obligations to those enabling the damage, even if their offerings also enable a lot of good. If you have the capacity to offer cheap/free VPS, then you also need to cover the cost of protecting against the DDoS attacks that service enables. You don't get to offload that burden on to the victims. If that makes your VPS offerings more expensive then so be it; that's the result of pricing in the externalities.
> If you have the capacity to offer cheap/free VPS, then you also need to cover the cost of protecting against the DDoS attacks that service enables.
Which would drive the cost back up. What you are saying is that it should be impossible to run cheap services, and therefore hobbyists and shoestring startups are not allowed anymore.
And as the sibling comment points out, where does this stop? Should ISPs be liable? DNS providers? Banks (already becoming an issue btw)? Why not just cut off anyone who looks suspicious from society, just in case?
We have a legal system for a reason. It may be slow and imperfect, but it’s better than the alternative. Rule by law beats rule by man any day of the week.
So if your kid downloaded a shady app, and it turned out that app had some residential VPN SDK, are you on the hook too? Does it stop at DDoS attacks? If it turned out they were scraping linkedin, can they sue you for a thousands of dollars of "harm" that you enabled?
Seems petty clear the intent of the post you are replying to isn't to hold random parents accountable for thousands and instead to hold app developers (add maybe too open app marketplaces) accountable for malicious app behavior
Then there is going to have to be geographic separation. Someone completely out of your jurisdiction or control can bring essential services down, leadership only has one option, to put up a Great Firewall. Or the wider public internet will be abandoned naturally as AI slop infests it.
There's a simpler explanation: Cloudflare (generally speaking, not 100%, as in the case of The Daily Stormer[1]) does not censor presumably-legal content traveling through their systems, and do not themselves opt to be arbiter of legality.
If you’re not using the legal system to seek action from Cloudflare, you’re unlikely to be heard by them. “I was injured for $20 and I seek as redress the customer payment details (issuing bank, account number) provided to Cloudflare so that I can identify and file a claim for financial redress against them” would be a lovely small claims lawsuit, for example. I haven’t heard of anyone trying that yet but I’d love to admire the results if someone does!
Would you prefer a huge organization that arbitrarily censors websites without a mechanism for appeal or legal process? The current state of affairs is way better.
Can you seriously see no space between hosting people advertising DDoS-for-hire services and arbitrarily censoring the Internet? Is this what passes as civil discourse these days?
That's especially rich considering that Cloudflare is the actor perhaps best known for blocking access to the Internet for people who seek privacy. Have you tried using Tor during the past several years? Or just a lesser popular web browser?
Look, it's very simple. When any one of your customers is exactly the criminal you sell protection against, you drop them, otherwise you are aiding and abiding. Perhaps not exactly in the sense of the law, if you have expensive enough lawyers, but in practice.
The current state of affairs is that cloudflare is that huge organization that arbitrarily censors websites without a mechanism for appeal or legal process.
Cloudflare actively removes your ability to decide for yourself which websites and systems you want to connect to by obscuring their sources.
Without Cloudflare I could decide for myself that I want to block certain networks to connect to my networks.
Cloudflare hiding the origin of these networks along with it's size in the market make Cloudflare exactly that huge organization.
> The current state of affairs is that cloudflare is that huge organization that arbitrarily censors websites without a mechanism for appeal or legal process.
Where are they censoring? You're talking about more than a single digit number of sites ever, right?
> Cloudflare actively removes your ability to decide for yourself which websites and systems you want to connect to by obscuring their sources.
What, you look up the ASN of sites before you decide if you want to connect to them? That ability is very unimportant at best. And any CDN or cloud host does the same kind of source-obscuring for servers.
> Without Cloudflare I could decide for myself that I want to block certain networks to connect to my networks.
How are they stopping you from filtering incoming connections? By running a VPN? I'm pro-VPN.
I always assumed ubuntu was brought down to prevent ubuntu servers from patching copy.fail, so that hacking group could exploit as many targets during that time as possible
There may be some processes that use this functionality ("lsof | grep AF_ALG"), but it is not that widespread AIUI, and so disabling it should not be an issue for the vast majority of systems.
copy.fail patches can be applied with minimum downtime, and a VM reboots in 30 seconds, tops, regardless of size. I believe all the apex servers are configured as HA to keep the load distributed, so normal users won't feel anything when copy.fail is patched.
Our users didn't feel a thing when we rolled out the patches.
But the Ubuntu update servers are necessary to serve the update. Taking them down prevents the users from downloading the update. I don't know whether the update servers were affected though.
Not the same case. If you get a bomb on a ups package, that's not UPS' fault.
But if you tell UPS someone is using them to send bombs to people, and they don't act on it in the least and even look like they are shielding bomb senders, then it starts being their fault a little bit, doesn't it?
What if there are one or two bomb senders out of the millions of people sending normal packages, and you have hundreds of thousands of false “tips” that are actually just harassment campaigns? Do you cut off service to the victims just in case? What if you can’t tell what half of the packages even are? Mystery mechanical parts and circuits?
How are they “shielding bomb senders” though?
Because their marketing static page was hosted through cloudflare?
Taking that down wouldn’t have changed anything here either.
This is a service, not a device sale. Continuing to provide a service to an organization that is using it to support criminal activity is very different and terminating clients for illegal activity is not controversial.
This is a flawed analogy. The "keyboard manufacturer" in this scenario is the "router manufacturer" who Cloudflare buys off of, not Cloudflare.
In your scenario Cloudflare is more like a newspaper aggregator which carries all sort filth along with it's normal commentary.
If this was a normal situation one could just decide not to read some filthy newspapers, while letting those who want to read it make that decision for themselves.
But in the Cloudflare scenario all the major relevant normal newspapers decided to publish all their content through Cloudflare and if something objectionable is published along with it, instead of taking your beef to the original publisher, you have to to take it up with Cloudflare who might just forward your details to some very unsavory people without you having a chance to know beforehand.
If a billboard company accepted an ad that included a threat on the president’s life or recruitment info for a known terror organization, are they complicit in the crime? Water is a basic utility so I don’t think that’s a fair comparison
This is more like a firearms dealer selling a gun to someone after they put their intended usage as “robbing banks” in the ATF form
> If a billboard company accepted an ad that included a threat on the president’s life or recruitment info for a known terror organization, are they complicit in the crime? Water is a basic utility so I don’t think that’s a fair comparison
Yet Meta and Twitter are doing fine, while this has happened.
Water was kinda intentional extreme end. Is there a line? Where is the line? Giving food for someone before they make a murder can give you much bigger jailtime than not giving it, and then just ignoring the knowledge that they are going to make a murder. It is not what you do but the act itself.
Nah this is more like a billboard service “selling” a billboard to someone (for free) and the billboard reads something like “wanna have a bank robbed for you? call me” — tbh not sure if that is illegal (probably depends on jurisdiction?)
Note in this example that the billboard seller is not told what messages will be placed on the billboard, and the billboard itself is a digital billboard that can change messages instantly on command and without permission required from the billboard seller.
An example that makes it more clear: "by that logic it's my fault that i was robbed for leaving the door to my house unlocked."
No, it's the robber's fault you were robbed. The robbery is the illegal part. It is not illegal to leave a door unlocked. Back to your train wreck of an example: it is not illegal to sell keyboards, and it is not illegal to provide water to people. Extortion is illegal. Denial of Service attacks are illegal.
That's where the line is. It is the border between legal and illegal.
Cloudflare didn't say "give us money or we'll cause you harm"... so no extortion. Cloudflare infrastructure wasn't used for the attack, so no DoS attack.
They sold services to two customers, one of whom did a crime independent of cloudflare.
If a robber sees Bob buy a bunch of expensive electronics at WalMart, and then buys a crowbar and robs him, is WalMart somehow responsible for the robbery?
> If a robber sees Bob buy a bunch of expensive electronics at WalMart, and then buys a crowbar and robs him, is WalMart somehow responsible for the robbery
Yes, if Walmart somehow knew robber’s intentions, but sold anyway. That is the primary question actually. Was the intent or act known or not.
Should Walmart be responsible for performing background checks on people buying crowbars to ensure they don’t intend to do harm? What about lighter fluid? Rat poison? Baseball bats?
Hanlon's Razor applies here. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Pretty much anyone can get onto the free tier for Cloudflare. The fact that someone is, doesn't mean that there is a business relationship with Cloudflare. There isn't.
In order to make this business model work, Cloudflare does essentially no due diligence. Getting onto the free tier before you need it, is cheap. And then if you really need them, you have every reason to start paying.
Ideally you'd hope that they would allow third party takedowns. But the ability to do third party takedowns provides a target for the exact attackers that their business is trying to protect against. They wouldn't have a business if they made that a viable target!
But the result of these business decisions, made for their main customer acquisition flow, makes them a tempting place to host malicious content, as well as good. Black hats make a sport out of taking each other out. And so have every reason to use Cloudflare.
Still doesn't indicate a relationship between Cloudflare and the bad actors who are taking advantage of the setup.
> Ideally you'd hope that they would allow third party takedowns. But the ability to do third party takedowns provides a target for the exact attackers that their business is trying to protect against.
I don't think that argument holds water. There's a world of difference between knocking a site offline with a DDoS and making a legal request which results in a hosting provider shutting it down.
They are both denial of services. While there indeed differences between them, they don't seem relevant here.
If a third party takedown system is poorly implemented (and it's pretty hard to create a balanced takedown system at scale), it may become more effective to abuse it instead of using DDoS.
What you are saying is that Canonical should have first updated the DNS to point at the attacker's web site IP (hosted by Cloudflare) for a few hours to let Cloudflare eat 3.5Tbps for a bit? :)
This is insanely dumb. Cloudflare is providing free hosting services, not materially supporting the attacker. You can argue that cloudflare needs to be better, or adopt different values towards, taking down sites they host, but this organization could absolutely just serve elsewhere (or just advertise their services over telegram or the like).
Maybe there is a point to be made about monopoly power in hosting and ddos protection. I don't really see how this blog post, or labelling it blackmail, help make that point.
It seems disingenuous to assume that CF offering some (unknown) amount of service to a malicious actor amounts to "blackmailing" someone that actor is attacking. CF could, and probably should, be better about not offering services to criminals but making a leap of logic certainly doesn't help anything.
Yeah, probably not - because they don't explicitly have to, as outlined in the post. The very architecture of CF's services essentially enables "blackmail as a service" in the sense that, CF protects the attacker and essentially creates a coercive environment in which the victim "has" to pay CF to protect them from... the very attacker that CF protects.
This is the part that's wrong. CF is not creating the fact that sites are vulnerable to DDoS, and these attacks would happen even if the sites were kicked off.
If some guys are going around slashing tires, would we demand that tire repair shops not sell to them? Would we say it's blackmail because the tire shop sells to anyone, and selling tires to them "creates a coercive environment"?
That gets confusing because it sounds like a special thing they're doing in addition to their main function.
If the back of the store was a convention center that allowed basically any small club to use it for free, and of their many thousands of hosted clubs one or two were focused around tire slashing, that wouldn't cause the same reactions.
Right. It's more abstract than that. They protect (from legal consequence or even discovery) the attackers and host them on their infrastructure so they're untouchable. Then they sell the same "protection" to the victims. It's the classic mafia protection scam.
I've never tried a subpoena. I've tried reporting them to ICANN for whois abuse contact violations and never received a response (after I recieved a response from cloudflare saying, "Go away, we don't care, sign up for our services and pay us to care."). Perhaps I should set up a gofundme or something for the thousands of dollars needed to get justice via subpoena.
If I were hosting illegal malicious actors doing this stuff on my home servers and refused to even say who was doing it I would 100% get my door kicked down by the FBI. But some persons, corporate persons, are more equal than others.
> If I were hosting illegal malicious actors doing this stuff on my home servers and refused to even say who was doing it I would 100% get my door kicked down by the FBI. But some persons, corporate persons, are more equal than others.
If you refused to tell some random person who asked? No, you wouldn’t. If you refused to respond to a legal authority—a court-issued subpoena, for example—then there would be consequences.
As far as cloudflare is concerned you’re just a random person asking. They have no legal obligation to provide you with information.
No you wouldn't. Unless you failed to comply with subpoenas/warrants/etc for it.
That assumes of course that like Cloudflare you were hosting a web page and not the actual illegal activity, and were following the laws around hosting things.
>I've tried reporting them to ICANN and never received a response.
So ICANN is complicit too? After all, if we adopt your interpretation, in some way ICANN is also turning an blind eye, both to what cloudflare is supposedly doing and also to what the domain registrars are doing.
In a way, yes, that makes it more okay. You can't have a conflict of interest if you have no interest. Cloudflare has clear interest in hosting the malicious actors and it's in clear conflict with providing services to their other users.
"Renting attack capacity from [cloudflare]" is inaccurate as I understand things. That group hosts their site behind cloudflare but I have not seen anyone claim that cloudflare's infra is used for the attacks.
This whole article seems conflate hosting an informational site run by the attackers and hosting the attack itself.
In The Before Times, there were very few problematic DDOS operations because... they would all DDOS one another offline. Websites, control infrastructure, anything.
DDOS protection services were provided by companies like Akamai; call for pricing, big companies only, absolutely no anonymous sign-ups.
Cloudflare revolutionised the industry by providing free DDOS protection to anyone, including DDOS-for-hire services. Preventing them from DDOSing one another offline really let the DDOS industry take flight.
It's been a well known story around Cloudflare from the beginning that they protect booters and other cybercrime actors just like any other (paying or non-paying) customer.
If you report the DDoS-for-hire actors that offer their services on forums where such things are offered openly, they reply with a template that freely interpreted say something along the lines that they can do nothing and who is a crimininal is .. like, just your opinion, man (checks notes) they say here they are a legit load tester operation, so nothing really we can do.
You can say they entered the scene because DDoS exploded in popularity, but you could just as easily make the argument it was the other way around. Make of that what you will but they sure made a lot of money from the same booters they protect their customers from.
> It's been a well known story around Cloudflare from the beginning that they protect booters and other cybercrime actors just like any other (paying or non-paying) customer.
Yep it's been talked about on HN for over a decade at least. There's a specific post I was looking for from 2011 or so but you can see from 2014 [1] it was well talked about.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7242377
So "big companies only, absolutely no anonymous sign-ups" should be the only ones able to put stuff on the internet without fearing that a random teenager can take your site offline for days just because they're bored?
No. Nobody said that.
Cloudflare should simply enforce basic rules, like "don't run a cybercrime storefront", rather than letting criminal operations like this proliferate.
How? Their sign-up flow would have to change dramatically. It might even become a process that is internally "expensive". There is likely one or more managers in charge of this decision and they don't want it. Additionally the current universe rewards the current situation (for them)
This is called KYC and is a standard part of operating a financial service. Seems to me like it should be part of internet infrastructure services as well. And, I thought, in some cases already is?
... and financial services companies huge and small still go out of their way to help their clients move money around in a myriad of ways, because it's very lucrative and there are so many loopholes and ways to obscure things. Offloading the responsibilities of law enforcement and regulatory bodies to private companies makes things worse for everybody. Providing non-crime services to criminals should not be a crime any more than selling a candy bar to a criminal is. As long as you aren't actively aiding or covering up for a crime, not reporting criminal activity is not even a crime in many areas, and if KYC can effectively identify criminals, law enforcement should be able to do it themselves.
Plausible deniability is all they really need. Asking companies not to make money in very likely to be legal ways will never work. If these people are really doing illegal business in plain sight it should be easy for law enforcement to catch them.
Seems like they could use Tor onion sites just as easily tbh.
I have no insight into this particular case/incident, but I do have to deal with a lot of http traffic management, and I've lately been seeing Cloudflare IPs show up a lot more often in my logs for probes and nuisances, and not because the traffic is being proxied (or at least, it doesn't have the CF-Connecting-Ip header).
Used for these attacks, dunno, used for some attacks, yes. (But CF still remains a much less frequent nuisance than pretty much any other infrastructure provider.)
One of types of services Cloudflare provides goes by the name "Warp". Calling it a VPN is only wrong in ways that don't really matter — it has the effect of causing client traffic to appear to originate from a different IP address to the one they're notionally connected to the Internet via.
I also found this confusing. And given how thorough and precise the author was with other elements, it seems like a deliberate gloss.
people will always be able to pick a handful of sites they think shouldnt be allowed to use cloudflare hosting services. the problem is that every person will have a different handful of sites. cloudflare should host everything and anything unless and until a lawful order is received.
if they start sticking their fingers into sites and determining whether the site's content is "appropriate" or whatever, based on some sort of nebulous set of criteria, people will get (justifiably) big mad about it, guaranteed.
the "renting attack capacity [from cloudflare]" should have some evidence behind it, because as far as i am aware, the attackers are not using cloudflare infrastructure for the actual attack.
(its really jarring to see the general sentiment on this submission vs. the general sentiment on google submissions)
"... its really jarring to see the general sentiment on this submission ..."
I am heartened to see a high default level of suspicion, bordering on contempt, for a global observer MITM'ing as much of the Internet as they can.
I'm not sure if Cloudflare is a malicious actor but we should all behave as if they are.
you are heartened to see people advocate for cloudflare to start proactively and arbitrarily deciding who can host legal content, instead of being content-neutral?
their size and the "man-in-the-middle"-ing is a huge problem. however, i dont think the solution is to encourage them to also start acting as content police.
i dont trust cloudflare, which is exactly why i dont want them policing my legal content. you want the "malicious actor" to exercise more control?
>I'm not sure if Cloudflare is a malicious actor but we should all behave as if they are.
Theres sentiment and content. If you claim something without evidence, you become another malicious actor.
Most companies have TOS that include not damaging or attacking the company itself. The advertised service attacks Cloudflare explicitly. It seems very straightforward that this would violate any reasonable TOS.
edit: and here it is straight from their TOS
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/website-terms/
"7. PROHIBITED USES
As a condition of your use of the Websites and Online Services, you will not use the Websites or Online Services for any purpose that is unlawful or prohibited by these Terms. You may not use the Websites or Online Services in any manner that could damage, disable, overburden, disrupt or impair any Cloudflare servers or APIs, or any networks connected to any Cloudflare server or APIs, or that could interfere with any other party's use and enjoyment of any Websites or Online Services. You may not transmit any viruses, worms, defects, Trojan horses, or any items of a destructive nature through your use of Websites or Online Services. You may not exceed or circumvent, or try to exceed or circumvent, limitations on the Websites or Online Services, including on any API calls, or otherwise use the Websites or Online Services in a manner that violates any Cloudflare documentation or user manuals. You may not attempt to gain unauthorized access to any Websites or Online Services, other accounts, computer systems, or networks connected to any Cloudflare server or to any of the Websites or Online Services through hacking, password mining, or any other means. You may not obtain or attempt to obtain any materials or information through any means not intentionally made available through the Websites or Online Services. You may not to use the Websites or Online Services in any way that violates any applicable federal, state, local, or international law or regulation (including, without limitation, any laws regarding the export of data or software to and from the US or other countries).
Cloudflare retains the right (but not the obligation) to block content from its Distributed Web Gateway that Cloudflare determines (in its sole discretion) to be illegal, harmful, or in violation of these Terms. For these purposes, illegal or harmful content includes but is not limited to: (a) content containing, promoting, or facilitating child sexual exploitation and abuse or human trafficking; (b) content that infringes on another person’s intellectual property rights or is otherwise unlawful; (c) content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence, or is intended to defraud the public; and (d) content that seeks to distribute malware, facilitate phishing, or otherwise constitutes technical abuse."
cloudflare is not hosting the infrastructure doing the actual attacks. the attack is coming from residential proxy servers, not from the webpage being hosted by cloudflare, which is just a marketing page and a login portal. that clause is not really applicable.
in any case, its not a question of whether cloudflare can remove a website. of course they can, for whatever reason they want.
its a question of whether we want to be in a world where cloudflare starts making content-based decisions on website hosting. most people probably dont want that.
> the webpage being hosted by cloudflare, which is just a marketing page and a login portal
thus being used for illegal and harmful activities right?
> Cloudflare retains the right (but not the obligation) to block content from its Distributed Web Gateway that Cloudflare determines (in its sole discretion) to be illegal, harmful
Not that I have any hope for TOS violation claims. I've learned early on in life that people generally don't care in life if you violate rules they invented if they're not impacted themselves. They do care if they violate someone else's rules and there is a chance of repercussions. There are exceptions, quite a few hosting companies in fact, but Cloudflare so far hasn't acted like a party that has the good of the web in its interest (even when strictly speaking of whom they offer services to despite them doing harm). Just wanted to point out that the cited clause, assuming it is correct as stated above, could be applied at Cloudflare's discretion if they so wished
>thus being used for illegal and harmful activities right?
neither the login portal page nor the marketing page are illegal.
>Cloudflare so far hasn't acted like a party that has the good of the web in its interest
for a lot of reasons, i generally agree with this statement. however, for this specific reason (maintaining a content-neutral approach, instead of playing content-police), i could not disagree more. cloudflare making hosting decisions based on the legal content of your site would be a huge disservice to the internet.
Wait, the webpage hosted by cloudflare, as you say. So yes, they're not hosting the infrastructure doing the actual attacks, they're "just" hosting the infrastructure for the site advertising the attacks.
"You may not use the services to attack our infrastructure. You may use the services to advertise and charge for attacking our infrastructure".
correct, you should be able to host any lawful website you want.
if a police investigation turns up that X DDoS is linked to Y advertising site, the police should then submit a lawful takedown request, which cloudflare will oblige.
One of the few reasonable comments on this thread.
I don’t see how cloudflare could have prevented this at all. Even if they took down the info site of the attackers they could just host it on GitHub pages, or a million other free static site hosters.
Zero evidence that cloudflare actually enabled the attack itself from what I can tell.
Cloudflare enables this because their stance is that they are a neutral carrier who is not responsible for the data they carry. If I send an abuse report to github for content on their system, there is a chance that I will be annoyed by how they handle it.
Cloudflare's core thing OTOH is to hide who I could be sending an abuse report to,
Possibly they will forward it ( more likely not) , but they will include my personal information in a report to an entity that is unknown to me, who are likely criminals, exposing me to danger.
You can report abuse here anonymously - what am I missing? https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/trust-hub/reporting-abuse/
>if they start sticking their fingers into sites and determining whether the site's content is "appropriate" or whatever
They already pick and choose. They have not decided to sit outside of it. Any claim about them not getting involved should be read as tacit approval. Because we know they will drop users they sufficiently disapprove of.
They have done this one time and the CEO said he regretted it.
For reference on that: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-cloudflare-helps-serv...
Articles like these seem to hold a weird belief that Cloudflare does not react to security reports or legal orders? From my experience, they react appropriately and relatively quickly compared to rest of the industry.
Could Cloudflare be more proactive or add more friction to their signups? Yes, probably, but the reasons they have outlined for not playing internet police make sense to me.
I don't think it should be a requirement to provide your credit card, phone number and a copy of your ID in order to host content on the internet...
The internet worked for so long because people responsible for each little island did what was for the most part in the best interests of the rest of the islands. If you didn't, other islands would shut off their links to you. Law enforcement was a last resort because 1. the courts don't move at the speed of the internet and 2. nobody wanted the internet getting top down governmental regulation because it was trans-national.
Cloudflare spent a bunch of venture capital to give away expensive things for free and buy market share. If you convince all the grocery stores to move to your island, you can operate a den of criminal activity with no fear of everyone else shunning you.
Talk to anyone who fights botnets, malware, or online scams. Once you hit the Cloudflare dead end you just have to give up. Law enforcement isn't going to take up a case where only 7,000 peoples computers are infected, and Cloudflare isn't going to investigate and take action themselves.
I do fight botnets, malware and scams. Criminals flock to any service where they can spread their stuff and appear legitimate. Google, Facebook, Vercel, Netlify, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft, OVH, etc. In my experience, Cloudflare is not any more or less of a dead end than any of the other providers, there are some others in that list who deserve being called out a lot more.
Yes, Cloudflare has always been really shitty and automated at responding to abuse reports, and because they are the front-end connection, it is impossible to pursue the report against the 'real' host unless Cloudflare is willing to provide you with information about where that host is: which they won't typically do, even if you are a fellow infrastructure provider. It's been several years, so maybe they have gotten better, but I would be surprised.
I don’t think it should be a requirement to talk to cloudflare at all to host content on the internet. I certainly don’t.
Oh absolutely agreed. Cloudflare becoming a giant internet chokepoint is certainly a real problem. It would be a much better world where ddos protection would not be a needed service or where we it was provided as a public service, rather than by private companies. However, that's not the world we live in.
How did you get that from the comment? It’s the other way around - if you report criminal or illegal sites hosted by cloudflare they will take it down.
I’ve hosted content online for decades and never once talked to cloudflare.
Will they? Have you gone through that process with them? In my experience (admittedly somewhat stale) it was fairly hard to get through to them, much less to get the information required to actually report bad actors to their real hosting provider that Cloudflare is fronting.
I once came across a website hosting extremely inappropriate content while surfing the web. I discovered that this website was using Cloudflare for DDoS protection and other purposes. I had a bit of a look online and found out how to submit a complaint to Cloudflare. On that form, I was asked for my email address and no other personal details, if I remember correctly. On the very same day, I received an email confirming that my complaint had been accepted and was under review - presumably an automated response. It was already quite late, so I went to sleep.
And just a few hours later, I received a letter informing that the information about the website in question had been forwarded to the relevant authorities, as well as to the website’s hosting provider. To be honest, I didn’t read that second email until the next day (I was sleeping), and it seems the website's hosting provider acted quickly (or the site owners decided to cover their tracks), because when I went to that website to check how it is going, it was no longer active, no longer existed at all. It just was gone. That was about six months ago.
So... I won’t speak for others’ experiences, but in this particular case, they reacted quickly and quite effectively. Perhaps other people have had different experiences.
I haven’t but it seems you have gone through it successfully with some friction (which is probably good?)
Cloudflare & AWS wouldn't even INVESTIGATE a abuse report I sent because there weren't any "infringing URLs" or "specific resources".
I provided enough evidence for them to at least be able to kickstart a internal investigation or even CONTACT the abusive customer, which they did not do.
If it were a stresser, all they would see is a login panel. It's not like these sites are publicly advertising what they're doing...
That's not a "weird belief". Cloudflare positions itself as "infrastructure". That means they think they are not responsible for the content that they carry.
In a normal scenario, if you want to protect your systems from other "bad" systems on the internet, you can block them on the IP layer.
But Cloudflare operates at the IP layer proxying data between you and good and bad (and everything in between) systems.
In a normal situation you could block and report a site that is run by the the mob, by either blocking them at the IP level or by contacting the abuse@ of the organization that is hosting the content.
Cloudflare is making it so that you can't do either. And if you send an abuse report to Cloudflare, you cannot be sure that they will not just forward your contact information directly to the entity that you are complaining about. They have changed their stance over the years to appear more responsible, but the fact remains:
If I want to send an abuse@ report to a system that is hidden behind Cloudflare I can not be sure that they won't just forward it without me knowing who they are forwarding it to.
Relevant post from last week:
> Why is Cloudflare protecting the DDoS'er (beamed.st) attacking Ubuntu servers?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025001
I dislike CFs role in the modern Internet as much as the next person, but this is a bunch of speculation trying to connect dots with no basis other than that a Canonical cert renewal happened on the same day as a company transfer.
There might be somewhat of a tangential story, however, in that Njalla seems to have reorganized or changed ownership fairly recently[1], and that Njalla and immateriali.sm seem to be related entities[2]
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/njalla-has-silently-changed-a-word... https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/pdf/2026/dio20...
The article puts it very succinctly: Cloudflare fronts attackers for free and bills the victims for relief.
Ddos protection services can be cast as a digital protection racket where they have a perverse incentive to keep attackers attacking. “It's a dangerous internet out there; you'd better pay us to protect your website from the attackers using our free tier.” At the least, even if there is no active collusion or profit sharing or anything like that, there is not a clear side that the DDos protector service is on?
Ok, so what's the solution?
I do agree with your comment. But obviously Cloudflare didn't invent DDoS. If Cloudflare just magically disappears tomorrow, the AI crawlers won't stop. So what's the alternative? It's not a world you need to upload a government-issued ID to browse the internet, right? ...right?
Don’t offer service to DDoS rings?
That doesn't get rid of the important perverse incentives. They still "want" DDoS all over from a monetary perspective. Kicking off the web page of the attackers will have a slight impact but not a whole lot.
The thing is, you can control a neighborhood, a country etc. from attackers and establish control over violence.
How can we do that, if we would like to preserve relative anonymity and global nature of the internet?
People can indeed form cooperatives to handle the protection, but this is hard to manage globally as an entity. DDoS protection is done by primarily having too much capacity to tank it and then filter it. The required investment is rather high.
You can’t have both ‘sockpuppet-grade anonymity’ and ‘held liable for their actions’ in the same society, whether Internet or otherwise. Both in reality and online, those that create sockpuppet corporations-slash-identities are unmasked only when their web of sockpuppetry is pierced by e.g. ‘reused a mailbox’, ‘used a neighbor’s identity’, ‘used a family member’s identity’, and so on. Until such investigations, sockpuppets get away with billions of dollars-slash-gigabits of crimes every year, and barring the ever-incompetence of most criminals, the Internet is a vast improvement over shell corporations in that regard. Still. It is technically possible to be able to ban the controlling human of an online sockpuppet without violating their anonymity, but we lack the societal infrastructure to do so — and since our own techno-utopian societies have invested no effort in doing so, it seems like the core utopian ideal could be ‘freedom from consequences’, rather than ‘freedom of anonymity’. If that’s a valid interpretation, then the core issue is not ‘preserve relative anonymity’, it is ‘preserve relative non-liability’, which may offer new avenues for much cheaper investment than pseudoanonymity would cost.
This seems like one of those cases where you need to assign responsibilities and obligations to those enabling the damage, even if their offerings also enable a lot of good. If you have the capacity to offer cheap/free VPS, then you also need to cover the cost of protecting against the DDoS attacks that service enables. You don't get to offload that burden on to the victims. If that makes your VPS offerings more expensive then so be it; that's the result of pricing in the externalities.
> If you have the capacity to offer cheap/free VPS, then you also need to cover the cost of protecting against the DDoS attacks that service enables.
Which would drive the cost back up. What you are saying is that it should be impossible to run cheap services, and therefore hobbyists and shoestring startups are not allowed anymore.
And as the sibling comment points out, where does this stop? Should ISPs be liable? DNS providers? Banks (already becoming an issue btw)? Why not just cut off anyone who looks suspicious from society, just in case?
We have a legal system for a reason. It may be slow and imperfect, but it’s better than the alternative. Rule by law beats rule by man any day of the week.
So if your kid downloaded a shady app, and it turned out that app had some residential VPN SDK, are you on the hook too? Does it stop at DDoS attacks? If it turned out they were scraping linkedin, can they sue you for a thousands of dollars of "harm" that you enabled?
Seems petty clear the intent of the post you are replying to isn't to hold random parents accountable for thousands and instead to hold app developers (add maybe too open app marketplaces) accountable for malicious app behavior
This road seems to lead to the exclusion of third party app stores and/or the ability to load apps that aren't signed by Google/Apple.
That’s what they want, it’s why you often see people popping up in discussions on HN supporting licensing for software developers.
Same with ISPs.
> People can indeed form cooperatives to handle the protection, but this is hard to manage globally as an entity.
This is a fascinating idea. Is this something anyone is working on?
In a sense, one can argue IPFS can do it, provided the content is syndicated widely enough. It is not, though.
Similarly, BitTorrent does roughly the same once the peer relationships are established.
Then there is going to have to be geographic separation. Someone completely out of your jurisdiction or control can bring essential services down, leadership only has one option, to put up a Great Firewall. Or the wider public internet will be abandoned naturally as AI slop infests it.
There's a simpler explanation: Cloudflare (generally speaking, not 100%, as in the case of The Daily Stormer[1]) does not censor presumably-legal content traveling through their systems, and do not themselves opt to be arbiter of legality.
[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
It's a protection racket born of fundamental weaknesses in the Internet's bedrock protocols.
Completly agree, cloudflare protects scammers on a huge scale and no one cares...
All the faceshops I have reporeted to cloudflare, all these phising pages behind cloudflare I reported, never came down.
None of them.
For a company making billions, protecting people, they should take this stuff serious.
If you’re not using the legal system to seek action from Cloudflare, you’re unlikely to be heard by them. “I was injured for $20 and I seek as redress the customer payment details (issuing bank, account number) provided to Cloudflare so that I can identify and file a claim for financial redress against them” would be a lovely small claims lawsuit, for example. I haven’t heard of anyone trying that yet but I’d love to admire the results if someone does!
Would you prefer a huge organization that arbitrarily censors websites without a mechanism for appeal or legal process? The current state of affairs is way better.
Can you seriously see no space between hosting people advertising DDoS-for-hire services and arbitrarily censoring the Internet? Is this what passes as civil discourse these days?
That's especially rich considering that Cloudflare is the actor perhaps best known for blocking access to the Internet for people who seek privacy. Have you tried using Tor during the past several years? Or just a lesser popular web browser?
Look, it's very simple. When any one of your customers is exactly the criminal you sell protection against, you drop them, otherwise you are aiding and abiding. Perhaps not exactly in the sense of the law, if you have expensive enough lawyers, but in practice.
The current state of affairs is that cloudflare is that huge organization that arbitrarily censors websites without a mechanism for appeal or legal process.
Cloudflare actively removes your ability to decide for yourself which websites and systems you want to connect to by obscuring their sources.
Without Cloudflare I could decide for myself that I want to block certain networks to connect to my networks.
Cloudflare hiding the origin of these networks along with it's size in the market make Cloudflare exactly that huge organization.
> The current state of affairs is that cloudflare is that huge organization that arbitrarily censors websites without a mechanism for appeal or legal process.
Where are they censoring? You're talking about more than a single digit number of sites ever, right?
> Cloudflare actively removes your ability to decide for yourself which websites and systems you want to connect to by obscuring their sources.
What, you look up the ASN of sites before you decide if you want to connect to them? That ability is very unimportant at best. And any CDN or cloud host does the same kind of source-obscuring for servers.
> Without Cloudflare I could decide for myself that I want to block certain networks to connect to my networks.
How are they stopping you from filtering incoming connections? By running a VPN? I'm pro-VPN.
I always assumed ubuntu was brought down to prevent ubuntu servers from patching copy.fail, so that hacking group could exploit as many targets during that time as possible
> I always assumed ubuntu was brought down to prevent ubuntu servers from patching copy.fail
On Ubuntu copy.fail could be mitigated against with some modprobe(8) config tweaks:
There may be some processes that use this functionality ("lsof | grep AF_ALG"), but it is not that widespread AIUI, and so disabling it should not be an issue for the vast majority of systems.copy.fail patches can be applied with minimum downtime, and a VM reboots in 30 seconds, tops, regardless of size. I believe all the apex servers are configured as HA to keep the load distributed, so normal users won't feel anything when copy.fail is patched.
Our users didn't feel a thing when we rolled out the patches.
But the Ubuntu update servers are necessary to serve the update. Taking them down prevents the users from downloading the update. I don't know whether the update servers were affected though.
They were affected, update service was intermittent for a couple days
That'd be extortion, not blackmail. CF did neither thing.
I'm not sure how correct this is but when you upgrade your tier on Cloudflare aren't the costs basically up to Cloudflare?
With the horror stories heard over the years I think a real issue is no hard pricing cap with forced shutdown.
Unless that's changed? I booted them a year ago..
With this kind of logic we can blame keyboard manufacturers for the illegal things their products wrote.
Not the same case. If you get a bomb on a ups package, that's not UPS' fault.
But if you tell UPS someone is using them to send bombs to people, and they don't act on it in the least and even look like they are shielding bomb senders, then it starts being their fault a little bit, doesn't it?
What if there are one or two bomb senders out of the millions of people sending normal packages, and you have hundreds of thousands of false “tips” that are actually just harassment campaigns? Do you cut off service to the victims just in case? What if you can’t tell what half of the packages even are? Mystery mechanical parts and circuits?
But in this case, all UPS was doing was delivering flyers for the bomb-makers, not delivering bombs.
How are they “shielding bomb senders” though? Because their marketing static page was hosted through cloudflare? Taking that down wouldn’t have changed anything here either.
This is a service, not a device sale. Continuing to provide a service to an organization that is using it to support criminal activity is very different and terminating clients for illegal activity is not controversial.
This is a flawed analogy. The "keyboard manufacturer" in this scenario is the "router manufacturer" who Cloudflare buys off of, not Cloudflare.
In your scenario Cloudflare is more like a newspaper aggregator which carries all sort filth along with it's normal commentary.
If this was a normal situation one could just decide not to read some filthy newspapers, while letting those who want to read it make that decision for themselves.
But in the Cloudflare scenario all the major relevant normal newspapers decided to publish all their content through Cloudflare and if something objectionable is published along with it, instead of taking your beef to the original publisher, you have to to take it up with Cloudflare who might just forward your details to some very unsavory people without you having a chance to know beforehand.
Or water companies for selling water for them. Where is the line?
If a billboard company accepted an ad that included a threat on the president’s life or recruitment info for a known terror organization, are they complicit in the crime? Water is a basic utility so I don’t think that’s a fair comparison
This is more like a firearms dealer selling a gun to someone after they put their intended usage as “robbing banks” in the ATF form
> If a billboard company accepted an ad that included a threat on the president’s life or recruitment info for a known terror organization, are they complicit in the crime? Water is a basic utility so I don’t think that’s a fair comparison
Yet Meta and Twitter are doing fine, while this has happened.
Water was kinda intentional extreme end. Is there a line? Where is the line? Giving food for someone before they make a murder can give you much bigger jailtime than not giving it, and then just ignoring the knowledge that they are going to make a murder. It is not what you do but the act itself.
Nah this is more like a billboard service “selling” a billboard to someone (for free) and the billboard reads something like “wanna have a bank robbed for you? call me” — tbh not sure if that is illegal (probably depends on jurisdiction?)
Note in this example that the billboard seller is not told what messages will be placed on the billboard, and the billboard itself is a digital billboard that can change messages instantly on command and without permission required from the billboard seller.
Obviously we need to go after supermarkets and corner stores since criminals eat, so somewhere past that.
how does anyone not know where the line is?
An example that makes it more clear: "by that logic it's my fault that i was robbed for leaving the door to my house unlocked."
No, it's the robber's fault you were robbed. The robbery is the illegal part. It is not illegal to leave a door unlocked. Back to your train wreck of an example: it is not illegal to sell keyboards, and it is not illegal to provide water to people. Extortion is illegal. Denial of Service attacks are illegal.
That's where the line is. It is the border between legal and illegal.
Cloudflare didn't say "give us money or we'll cause you harm"... so no extortion. Cloudflare infrastructure wasn't used for the attack, so no DoS attack.
They sold services to two customers, one of whom did a crime independent of cloudflare.
If a robber sees Bob buy a bunch of expensive electronics at WalMart, and then buys a crowbar and robs him, is WalMart somehow responsible for the robbery?
> If a robber sees Bob buy a bunch of expensive electronics at WalMart, and then buys a crowbar and robs him, is WalMart somehow responsible for the robbery
Yes, if Walmart somehow knew robber’s intentions, but sold anyway. That is the primary question actually. Was the intent or act known or not.
Should Walmart be responsible for performing background checks on people buying crowbars to ensure they don’t intend to do harm? What about lighter fluid? Rat poison? Baseball bats?
Firearms companies for wrongful death, keyboards for hacking, 3d printers for suicide drones. Shovels for holes.
There's not even any proof Beamed was responsible for the attack in the article--it's all speculation.
"Anonymous person on the internet claiming <thing>" is proof of nothing.
It's just as likely someone claimed they used Beamed to try to get a competing service taken down or direct attention elsewhere.
Don't get my wrong, Beamed looks like a scummy booter service with no legal purpose.
However, claiming companies should deplatform sites based on speculation is, imo, a very dangerous precedent.
Hanlon's Razor applies here. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Pretty much anyone can get onto the free tier for Cloudflare. The fact that someone is, doesn't mean that there is a business relationship with Cloudflare. There isn't.
In order to make this business model work, Cloudflare does essentially no due diligence. Getting onto the free tier before you need it, is cheap. And then if you really need them, you have every reason to start paying.
Ideally you'd hope that they would allow third party takedowns. But the ability to do third party takedowns provides a target for the exact attackers that their business is trying to protect against. They wouldn't have a business if they made that a viable target!
But the result of these business decisions, made for their main customer acquisition flow, makes them a tempting place to host malicious content, as well as good. Black hats make a sport out of taking each other out. And so have every reason to use Cloudflare.
Still doesn't indicate a relationship between Cloudflare and the bad actors who are taking advantage of the setup.
> Ideally you'd hope that they would allow third party takedowns. But the ability to do third party takedowns provides a target for the exact attackers that their business is trying to protect against.
I don't think that argument holds water. There's a world of difference between knocking a site offline with a DDoS and making a legal request which results in a hosting provider shutting it down.
Sure. Any evidence such a legal request has been made in this case? If not, why the whining?
They are both denial of services. While there indeed differences between them, they don't seem relevant here.
If a third party takedown system is poorly implemented (and it's pretty hard to create a balanced takedown system at scale), it may become more effective to abuse it instead of using DDoS.
What you are saying is that Canonical should have first updated the DNS to point at the attacker's web site IP (hosted by Cloudflare) for a few hours to let Cloudflare eat 3.5Tbps for a bit? :)
This is insanely dumb. Cloudflare is providing free hosting services, not materially supporting the attacker. You can argue that cloudflare needs to be better, or adopt different values towards, taking down sites they host, but this organization could absolutely just serve elsewhere (or just advertise their services over telegram or the like).
Maybe there is a point to be made about monopoly power in hosting and ddos protection. I don't really see how this blog post, or labelling it blackmail, help make that point.
Seems unavoidable if you're running DDoS protection services. Of course the people performing the attack also don't want to get attacked back.
Taking down their info site wouldn't have made the attack go away anyway.
It's not dumb. There's a conflict of interest.
Yeah, I demand all my hosting providers be 100% vulnerable to DDoS for this reason.
Yes.
I find a similar pattern to Meta's scammer ads.
Huge publicly traded companies benefitting from the illegal actions of their clients, turning a blind eye, or conveniently delaying their takedowns.
Big companies need to absorb the liability of small companies, otherwise you get this delegated Sybil Good bank/Bad bank attack
If they accept money to display malicious ads they should be prosecuted as accessories to the crime tbh
who would be they in that case? I don't think entities can be charged criminally.
A more basic middle ground would be making the company liable for the damages (civil court not criminal).
It seems disingenuous to assume that CF offering some (unknown) amount of service to a malicious actor amounts to "blackmailing" someone that actor is attacking. CF could, and probably should, be better about not offering services to criminals but making a leap of logic certainly doesn't help anything.
They didn’t.
Yeah, probably not - because they don't explicitly have to, as outlined in the post. The very architecture of CF's services essentially enables "blackmail as a service" in the sense that, CF protects the attacker and essentially creates a coercive environment in which the victim "has" to pay CF to protect them from... the very attacker that CF protects.
> and essentially creates a coercive environment
This is the part that's wrong. CF is not creating the fact that sites are vulnerable to DDoS, and these attacks would happen even if the sites were kicked off.
If some guys are going around slashing tires, would we demand that tire repair shops not sell to them? Would we say it's blackmail because the tire shop sells to anyone, and selling tires to them "creates a coercive environment"?
A tire repair shop that also hosted a the National Tire Slashing Club for free in the back?
I think it's fair to assume that would cause some reactions.
That gets confusing because it sounds like a special thing they're doing in addition to their main function.
If the back of the store was a convention center that allowed basically any small club to use it for free, and of their many thousands of hosted clubs one or two were focused around tire slashing, that wouldn't cause the same reactions.
Right. It's more abstract than that. They protect (from legal consequence or even discovery) the attackers and host them on their infrastructure so they're untouchable. Then they sell the same "protection" to the victims. It's the classic mafia protection scam.
>They protect (from legal consequence or even discovery) the attackers and host them on their infrastructure so they're untouchable
Victims can't file a subpoena to get account details?
I've never tried a subpoena. I've tried reporting them to ICANN for whois abuse contact violations and never received a response (after I recieved a response from cloudflare saying, "Go away, we don't care, sign up for our services and pay us to care."). Perhaps I should set up a gofundme or something for the thousands of dollars needed to get justice via subpoena.
If I were hosting illegal malicious actors doing this stuff on my home servers and refused to even say who was doing it I would 100% get my door kicked down by the FBI. But some persons, corporate persons, are more equal than others.
> If I were hosting illegal malicious actors doing this stuff on my home servers and refused to even say who was doing it I would 100% get my door kicked down by the FBI. But some persons, corporate persons, are more equal than others.
If you refused to tell some random person who asked? No, you wouldn’t. If you refused to respond to a legal authority—a court-issued subpoena, for example—then there would be consequences.
As far as cloudflare is concerned you’re just a random person asking. They have no legal obligation to provide you with information.
No you wouldn't. Unless you failed to comply with subpoenas/warrants/etc for it.
That assumes of course that like Cloudflare you were hosting a web page and not the actual illegal activity, and were following the laws around hosting things.
>I've tried reporting them to ICANN and never received a response.
So ICANN is complicit too? After all, if we adopt your interpretation, in some way ICANN is also turning an blind eye, both to what cloudflare is supposedly doing and also to what the domain registrars are doing.
ICANN doesn't get any kickbacks from Canonical needing to protect itself as far as I can tell. Cloudflare literally sells the protection.
So ICANN is alright because they're protecting them for free, but Cloudflare is bad because they're protecting them for money?
In a way, yes, that makes it more okay. You can't have a conflict of interest if you have no interest. Cloudflare has clear interest in hosting the malicious actors and it's in clear conflict with providing services to their other users.
I am curious about the existence of https://beamed.su/
That is one way of putting "DOS" for hireWTF does it really mean?
It is DDoS for hire. What are you asking exactly?
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