A call to action to defy Internet shutdowns and suppression of political opinion online

[GreenNet Support]

  GreenNet

Dear Friends, 	

*Thursday 5 December 2019
*



      We'd like to ask you to share this report
      <http://www.papuansbehindbars.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/PBB-Jan-2018-Oct-2019-Nov2019.EN_.web_.pdf>
      as far and wide as possible, here's why:

On Friday 22nd and Saturday 23rd November 2019 GreenNet's website and
most of our online services, including most of our customers’ websites,
went offline for several hours on two occasions. Our technicians became
aware of the outage on Friday lunchtime and worked remotely and at our
data centre until the small hours of Saturday morning to identify the
fault and restore access to websites and emails.

By about 2AM on Saturday things were coming back online, but they went
down again later that day. By then we had revised our initial diagnosis
of a hardware problem, and as we checked though our logs and discussed
with our upstream provider LDEX, we became aware that the outage was
caused by a deliberate attack on our infrastructure. We tweeted updates
as we worked to bring back our services at https://twitter.com/GreenNetISP
 
The attack was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) which basically
hammers away at our servers with millions of requests until they run out
of capacity and become unavailable. The volume of traffic at one point
was equivalent to our Data Centre's entire traffic with Google, which
gives an idea of the scale of the DDOS - the impact on the Data Centre
was significant enough that they also had to block access or "blackhole"
a large amount of traffic.

Once we had got everything back up the and dust had settled we were able
to carry out some forensic examinations of our servers and logs. We were
able to glean strong circumstantial evidence that we believe shows that
the target was an organisation that was publishing new research that
weekend https://www.papuansbehindbars.org
<https://www.papuansbehindbars.org/>.

*This is the report that the attack was aimed at blocking:
**http://www.papuansbehindbars.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/PBB-Jan-2018-Oct-2019-Nov2019.EN_.web_.pdf*
*
Now we'd like you to please disseminate it as widely as possible! *

We've been in contact with TAPOL https://www.tapol.org and SAFEnet
https://safenet.or.id/2019/08/keepiton-in-papua-and-west-papua, who work
closely with PBB and in the region to promote human rights and to
highlight the plight of political prisoners, as well as to challenge
internet shutdowns.

Please promote their important work! We will be tweeting about this over
the next few days, please retweet, boost and amplify the message, and
#keepiton <https://twitter.com/hashtag/keepiton>!

Thanks from all of us at GreenNet, we'd also really like to say a big
thank you to our customers for all your patience and support during and
after the attack.
 


      GreenNet is the ethical Internet Service Provider that has been
      connecting people and groups who work for peace, the environment,
      gender equality and human rights since 1986.

We hope that you are happy to receive our newsletter. If not, simply
unsubscribe here
<http://mailman.greennet.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/greennet-l> and you
will not receive it in future.

GreenNet, The Green House, 244-254 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9DA.
Tel (UK): 0330 355 4011 Tel (int'l): +44 (0)330 355 4011
Email: info at gn.apc.org <mailto:info at gn.apc.org>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.gn.apc.org/pipermail/greennet-l/attachments/20191205/9d44e73b/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: logo_2_0.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 5316 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://mailman.gn.apc.org/pipermail/greennet-l/attachments/20191205/9d44e73b/attachment.gif>