8chan and the Limits of Platform Protection
By Chris Eburne · Module IT
Last Monday, the cyber security company Cloudflare withdrew its protection services from 8chan, and within minutes the site was unreachable due to DDoS attacks. 8chan users had been reported as inciting hate speech.
What Happened
The owner of 8chan released a video stating that he had worked with law enforcement agencies to comply with the law.
When Cloudflare removed its protection, 8chan became immediately vulnerable to distributed denial of service attacks and was inundated with traffic until it was unusable.
In response, 8chan switched to BitMitigate, another protection company owned by a firm called Epik. However, Epik and BitMitigate relied on infrastructure provided by Voxility, who subsequently dropped them from their network entirely due to the controversy.
The Wider Lesson
This case illustrates something important for any business: DDoS protection is infrastructure, not a luxury. Without it, even a small amount of malicious traffic can take a site offline instantly.
Key takeaways for businesses:
- DDoS protection should be in place before an attack, not after
- Know who your upstream providers are and understand their policies
- Understand your hosting and CDN dependencies
Module IT can advise on network resilience and DDoS mitigation for UK businesses. Get in touch to find out more.
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