UPDATE: Roll Out The Recall With The Solidarity Singers...
You just gotta love what these folks do. They've invented a whole genre of protest!
A computer professional from Milwaukee was called in to United Wisconsin's office in Milwaukee this afternoon to see why its website, which is a main portal for the recall of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, crashed. The website hosts pertinent information regarding field coordination, contacts, FAQs and other information pertinent to the recall campaign. The computer scientist stated, via email that "The site was brought to its knees. I was asked to take a look, and there is an insane amount of requests hitting the server... which is the hallmark of ddos… still working on details."
I asked if there was an antidote and his reply was: "Not a cure all, but they should be able to be back up from this attack fairly soon. This is the stuff of highly paid security professionals... Grassroots groups usually are not targets of these kinds of sophisticated attacks. They are working with their hosting company, which is the best bet since they live and breath this stuff."
According to Wikipedia,
A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person, or multiple people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely.
So far, no one has come forward to claim responsibility.
Do you think the rightwing is worried about this recall?
UPDATE: Message From United Wisconsin
(This just came into my inbox)
United Wisconsin Website Under Cyber Attack
-An Important Update to Our Supporters-
Dear Noise of Rain,
Early this afternoon, United Wisconsin's website www.unitedwisconsin.com, was the victim of a cyber attack. It appears this attack may be ongoing. Our web team reports that this attack was coordinated and deliberate.
The attack, which is known as a Distributed Denial of Service Attack, flooded our servers at approximately 2:00pm. At this time the source of this attack is not fully known. However, we are reporting this to the FBI and Wisconsin Attorney General, and taking all the steps we can to ensure this does not happen again.
Clearly this was done to deny the people of Wisconsin access to the recall Walker materials United Wisconsin is trying to provide.
Despite these efforts to again stifle the people's voice, United Wisconsin and its partners are not shaken. The efforts to recall Scott Walker and Rebecca Kleefisch are continuing as planned.
It is our intention to continue as planned to provide you with a link to the recall petitions just after midnight tonight. Please bear with us as we attempt to fix this problem. Some external pages associated with our website are still up and running, and are not affected by this outage.
In the meantime, should you need to contact United Wisconsin please email PR@unitedwisconsin.com.
And you can contribute here to United Wisconsin.