On Feb. 10, Jason Fyk received a strange Facebook message.
“Bro.”
The message had been sent by someone who wasn’t his friend on the social network, someone using the alias “Anthony.*” It was a name Fyk had come to know and dread.
Minutes later, the traffic on his website, FunnierPics.net, nosedived. Google Analytics showed the number of active readers drop from 3,000 to zero instantly.
When Fyk, known online as Jason Michaels, clicked over to his company’s Facebook page, WTF Magazine, he found another message from Anthony.
“Site’s down :(.”
Fyk’s business was under attack, and not for the first time. He’d spent the past few years locked in ferocious virtual combat over his Facebook pages, battling a shadowy group of adversaries that he and his friends call Script Kiddies, on the assumption that they're young hackers who exploit low-level vulnerabilities on others' sites.
Fyk said he received this Facebook wall post right as his site was crashing.
Anthony prefers the name the Community, and he readily admits — albeit communicating only under a pseudonym — that the group’s activities include hijacking valuable Facebook pages for fun and viral fame. (Meanwhile, Anthony and his cohorts refer to the WTF team as the Neckbeards.)
One of Fyk’s employees quickly determined that FunnierPics.net was under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) reflection attack. When Fyk’s team contacted the host, GoDaddy, they learned an estimated 70,000 servers had gone dead, resulting in more than 1 million customers losing web service. Fyk’s IP address, GoDaddy confirmed, was the attackers’ target. The others were collateral damage.
“Imagine the World Wide Web is like a six-lane highway, and each exit is its own server,” Fyk said. “And one of the exits is my server.” The attack sent so much traffic up the road to Fyk’s exit that every exit preceding it became jammed as well.
And the waves of bots were still coming.
Within 16 hours, Fyk’s team got his site working again, but not before they’d lost $15,000 in ad revenue. Since then, his company has been subjected to a number of similar attacks, and one of Fyk’s most valuable Facebook pages, an MTV fan page with 1.3 million fans, has been hijacked, stolen by a user who used a security glitch.
Fyk, 40, is a self-made millionaire who’s built his fortune almost entirely on Facebook. It’s a rewarding business but not without its challenges. Not only must he play a constant game of cat and mouse with hackers and digital thieves but he must do so on a field of battle that is constantly shifting because of Facebook’s habit of routinely — and mysteriously — tweaking its algorithm.
“It’s legitimately a cyber war,” said Fyk, who describes his archenemies as tech-savvy teens who are motivated by boredom. “I make almost a quarter-million dollars a month, so I have to protect what I’m doing. That means if I have to play their kiddie game, I play. I don’t have a choice.”
They may be kiddie games, but they are hardly trivial, having led to physical threats, out-and-out swindling, and run-ins with police.
And while Facebook security monitors for suspicious behavior, digital theft seems to be running rampant.
“Bro.”
The message had been sent by someone who wasn’t his friend on the social network, someone using the alias “Anthony.*” It was a name Fyk had come to know and dread.
Minutes later, the traffic on his website, FunnierPics.net, nosedived. Google Analytics showed the number of active readers drop from 3,000 to zero instantly.When Fyk, known online as Jason Michaels, clicked over to his company’s Facebook page, WTF Magazine, he found another message from Anthony.
“Site’s down :(.”
Fyk’s business was under attack, and not for the first time. He’d spent the past few years locked in ferocious virtual combat over his Facebook pages, battling a shadowy group of adversaries that he and his friends call Script Kiddies, on the assumption that they're young hackers who exploit low-level vulnerabilities on others' sites.
Fyk said he received this Facebook wall post right as his site was crashing.
Anthony prefers the name the Community, and he readily admits — albeit communicating only under a pseudonym — that the group’s activities include hijacking valuable Facebook pages for fun and viral fame. (Meanwhile, Anthony and his cohorts refer to the WTF team as the Neckbeards.)
One of Fyk’s employees quickly determined that FunnierPics.net was under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) reflection attack. When Fyk’s team contacted the host, GoDaddy, they learned an estimated 70,000 servers had gone dead, resulting in more than 1 million customers losing web service. Fyk’s IP address, GoDaddy confirmed, was the attackers’ target. The others were collateral damage.
“Imagine the World Wide Web is like a six-lane highway, and each exit is its own server,” Fyk said. “And one of the exits is my server.” The attack sent so much traffic up the road to Fyk’s exit that every exit preceding it became jammed as well.
And the waves of bots were still coming.
Within 16 hours, Fyk’s team got his site working again, but not before they’d lost $15,000 in ad revenue. Since then, his company has been subjected to a number of similar attacks, and one of Fyk’s most valuable Facebook pages, an MTV fan page with 1.3 million fans, has been hijacked, stolen by a user who used a security glitch.
Fyk, 40, is a self-made millionaire who’s built his fortune almost entirely on Facebook. It’s a rewarding business but not without its challenges. Not only must he play a constant game of cat and mouse with hackers and digital thieves but he must do so on a field of battle that is constantly shifting because of Facebook’s habit of routinely — and mysteriously — tweaking its algorithm.
“It’s legitimately a cyber war,” said Fyk, who describes his archenemies as tech-savvy teens who are motivated by boredom. “I make almost a quarter-million dollars a month, so I have to protect what I’m doing. That means if I have to play their kiddie game, I play. I don’t have a choice.”
They may be kiddie games, but they are hardly trivial, having led to physical threats, out-and-out swindling, and run-ins with police.
And while Facebook security monitors for suspicious behavior, digital theft seems to be running rampant.
by Alyson Shontell, Business Insider | Read more:
Image: Business Insider
