One of the most popular fan story websites was offline for over 30 hours due to a hacker attack. The reasons for this are bizarre.
On July 10th and 11th, 2023, the Archives of our Own website was offline for approximately 30 hours. The reason for this was a DDOS attack. The hacker group Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for the attack.
A chronological review of the attack can be found on the website’s official Twitter account:
What is this for a page? Colloquially abbreviated to AO3, Archives of our Own is an archive of fan content. It’s about self-written stories (fanfiction), pictures (fanart) and more in all areas of entertainment.
This includes games, anime, music bands, movies, and TV shows. AO3 is run on a non-commercial basis by volunteers. In total there are over 11.4 million works by over 6 million users on the site. There are over half a million fanworks for Marvel alone.
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Who are the actors?
Who is behind Anonymous Sudan’s plans? The hacker group has apparently been active since January 2023 and has been making headlines ever since.
For example, in April 2023 they attacked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s website and Facebook account, and in June 2023 they attacked Microsoft and its Office 365 programs, causing the applications to be down for several hours. Western financial service providers are also repeatedly the target of their attacks.
The group poses as an Islamist terrorist group that is allegedly religiously and politically motivated.
However, security experts believe the group has no ties to Sudan or Islamism. Rather, indications point to a connection to the pro-Russian hacker collective Killnet. This connection was confirmed in February 2023 (via Flashpoint).
There is also evidence that the group are state-sponsored Russian hackers who repeatedly attack Western targets. For example, the approach and tactics behind the attacks are similar to those of Russian state-backed opponents.
“Anonymous Sudan is a Russian information organization that wants to use its Islamic legitimacy to advocate closer cooperation between Russia and the Islamic world,” Mattias Wåhlén, a threat analysis expert based in Stockholm, told Bloomberg. “[Die Hackergruppe] keeps claiming that Russia is the friend of Muslims.”
What is a DDOS attack anyway?
The abbreviation stands for the English “Distributed Denial of Service attack” and describes a deliberate overload of the data network by sending a large number of requests to the corresponding website.
The site then collapses due to the sheer load of requests. Due to the sheer number of requests from many computers, the source of the attack cannot be blocked at first.
Why the attack on the fans page? In a statement, the group said it attacked AO3 because “the site is full of disgusting smut and other LGBTQ+ and NSFW stuff.”
Hackers fail with their plan
However, the hacker’s plan didn’t work out. Very early on, the operators of AO3 posted a statement on the hacker group’s covert plans and a call that they would not tolerate any anti-Muslim statements:
They get a lot of love and support from their community for the ongoing fight against the DDOS attack.
How is the community reacting? In addition to support for the site operators of AO3, the community is setting up alternative Discord servers on which stories and pictures of favorite fandoms are simply shared there for the duration of the attack. Alternatively, read on other sites such as Wattpad. Necessity is the mother of invention.
@pianokeyswithh
A place to trade fics, make friends, talk about fandoms, finding lost fics and writing fics! 90 members and counting ask to join #ao3 #ao3fanfic #ao3fanfiction #ao3isdown #discord #server #discordserver
♬ original sound – Maddy McKenzie
Instead of hate, AO3 and the volunteers working there under high pressure are showered with love, while of course the first fanfictions about the DDOS attack are already being written at the same time.
Among other things, you will find the first love stories between the website AO3 and the DDoS attacker there. Many of these also go in a sexually explicit direction. Some other users are posting self-made awards on social media saying they “survived” the AO3 failure.
The site itself assures that no account details have been stolen and that account invites have been disabled for now. The latter need new users to register on AO3.