Hacktivist group Anonymous accuses CloudFlare of protecting ISIS-linked websites
01 Dec 2015
Hacktivist group Anonymous has accused a Silicon Valley firm of protecting certain ISIS-linked websites against cyber attacks.
According to the group, CloudFlare was allowing terrorists to repel attacks from Anonymous by preventing distributed denial of service attacks, in which, websites are overwhelmed with traffic, forcing them to shut down - on websites linked to ISIS.
CloudFlare provides customers, tools, including a protection service which routes connections through its own network during a DDoS.
According to Anonymous, the service was helping pro-ISIS websites to avoid attacks and to help keep propaganda sites online.
A recent report claimed CloudFlare was protecting 40 websites linked to terrorism, including 37 that posted pro-ISIS propaganda.
The company said that there were millions of pages in its service, which made it difficult to take any down in response to requests, but that it complied with proper legal requests. It had also said that authorities often wanted company to keep sites up so that they could continue to be analysed.
''I'd suggest this was armchair analysis by kids - it's hard to take seriously. Anonymous uses us for some of its sites, despite pressure from some quarters for us to take Anonymous sites offline,'' Matthew Prince, CloudFlare's CEO, told The Register.
CloudFlare deploys a cloud-based content delivery network to prevent websites being taken offline by malicious threat actors.
One of the main threats it defends against is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, a favourite technique of Anonymous.
''Once again, @CloudFlare have been found to be providing services to pro #IslamicState websites'', an Anonymous-affiliated account tweeted.
The tweet referred to an incident in 2013 when similar claims were leveled against CloudFlare for hosting of a mujahideen site with ties to Al Qaeda.
He cited the fact that Anonymous itself used his company's services, and had not had its websites removed despite the controversy the group often found itself in.
