----- Forwarded message from GreenNet Support
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2019 18:07:56 +0000
Subject: A call to action to defy Internet shutdowns and suppression of
political opinion online
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.
*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, 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@gn.apc.org <mailto:info@gn.apc.org>
----- End forwarded message -----
[Please note that ETAN is a supporter of Papuans Behind Bars (PBB). And as of the time we prepared to forward the message below, the PBB website was slow. If you cannot reach the PBB website, you can read the text of the PBB Jan-2018-Oct-2019-Nov2019 report here: https://lists.riseup.net/www/arc/reg.westpapua/2019-11/msg00035.html - or download the PDF here: http://etan.org/etanpdf/PBB-Jan-2018-Oct-2019-Nov2019.EN_.web_.pdf --John for ETAN]
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