Mexican and American governmental and financial websites - April 1998

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DATE:
1998-04

AFFECTED COUNTRIES:
Mexico, USA

AFFECTED SITES:
Zedillo Administration, Clinton White House, Mexican Stock Exchange (Bolsa), and Chase Manhattan Bank

EFFECT OF ATTACKS:
At least Zedillo was offline periodically

SOURCE COUNTRY:
23 countries. Organized in NY.

ALLEGED ATTACKERS:
Electronic Disturbance Theater

TYPE OF ATTACK:
DDoS

ATTACK SPECIFICS:
Voluntary DDoS organized by Electronic Civil Disobedience/Electronic Disturbance Theater and utilizing the Flood Net software.

"On Friday, April 10, there were 8,141 hits on the Flood Net URL which activated a looped ping command sent to the President Zedillo web site in Mexico City. These hits came from 23 countries! When a user visited the Flood Net URL a command to send a request to access the web site of the Zedillo adminstration was sent every 7 seconds for as long as the user was connected to Flood Net.

"We know that Zedillo's web site was successfully interrupted intermittently throughout the day on April 10. We base this claim on our own observations and on reports received from others who informed us when the Zedillo site was down. We estimate that when 500 or more people were simultaneously connected to Flood Net this caused the Zedillo site to become inaccessible. This occured during times of peak connectivity to Flood Net.

"Our actions were significant enough that there were attempts to break into the T1 servers at The Thing. Our actions received attention at a provider in Mexico. Someone from the machine t3s31.data.net.mx tried to gain access to computers at The Thing but failed. Stefan was spammed with about 3,000 messages containing cryptic warnings.

"We have proven again that we can act collectively and simultaneously on the Net! Our action builds on a similar plan issued earlier this year by the Anonymous Digital Coalition. The difference is that this time we automated the web site reloading process. Let's see what improvements we can make for next time. " (3)

Attacks scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of Emiliano Zapata's death

EVENT DESCRIPTION:
"On April 10, 1998, participate in global electronic civil disobedience actions to protest the Mexican government's escalating war against the Zapatistas and other indigenous people in Chiapas." (1) Site includes instructions to "focus on [the] four sites." This was staged as "dress rehearsal" to see if people around the world can work together simultaneously on the Internet.

URLS:
1. http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/April10.html
2. http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/April10print.html
3. http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/April10update.html

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