The Federal Communications Commission of United States has made it official that its website became a victim of a cyber attack on late Sunday. As the attack came shortly after noted comedian John Oliver urged viewers of his HBO Show to file comments on Net Neutrality Rules, FCC thought earlier thought that its website crash was a result of a server glitch due to traffic overload.
But after launching a detailed probe on a technical note, FCC clarified that its website crashed due to Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) launched by some anonymous hackers.
In 2014, a similar sort of attack was launched on FCC which resulted in a site down for more than 12 hours.
David Bray, Chief Information Officer of FCC released a press statement on Monday evening saying that the site crash took place not by the sheer volume of comments, but due to a DDoS cyber attack.
As per our Cybersecurity Insider sources, the site was being hosted on a commercial cloud server. Hackers somehow gained access to the server and bombarded the FCC’s comment system with a high volume of comment’s traffic which in fact were found to be originated from Bots and not through humans.
Mr. Bray suspects that the motive of the hackers in launching such attacks was to flood the servers with fake traffic making it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file comments with the FCC.
David ruled out the media reports which said that it was an act of some state-sponsored actors funded by a Foreign Nation. He added that there is no such evidence proving that the cyber attack was launched by a nation such as North Korea or Russia.
Note– FCC is an independent agency of the United States which regulates interstate communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable in all 50 states of America.
