Analyzing the Impact of Cloudflare’s Disruption on Kiwi Farms Forum Activity and Web Traffic
Authors:
(1) Anh V. Vu, University of Cambridge, Cambridge Cybercrime Center ([email protected]));
(2) Alice Hutchings, University of Cambridge, Cambridge Cybercrime Center ([email protected]));
(3) Ross Anderson, University of Cambridge and University of Edinburgh ([email protected]).
Ties
Summary and 1 Introduction
2. Travel and impact
2.1. Related work
2.2. Kiwi farmers
3. Methods, data and ethical sets, and 3.1. Forum and image table discussions
3.2. Telegrams cats and 3.3. Traffical and research on web traffic and analyzes
3.4. Tweets made by the online community and 3.5. Data license
3.6. Ethical considerations
4. The impact on forum activity and traffic, and 4.1. The impact of major disturbances
4.2. Displacement of the platform
4.3. Traffic fragmentation
5. The impacts on the stakeholders concerned and 5.1. The community that launched the campaign
5.2. Industry responses
5.3. Forum operators
5.4. Forum members
6. Tensions, challenges and implications and 6.1. The effectiveness of the disturbance
6.2. Censorship against freedom of expression
6.3. The role of industry in content moderation
6.4. Political implications
6.5. Limitations and future work
7. Conclusion, thanks and references
Annex A.
4. The impact on forum activity and traffic
On September 3, 2022, Cloudflare interrupted its DDOS prevention service, which attracted major advertising. This intervention led to a sudden and significant increase in the world interest in Kiwi farms with a peak of seven times, as well as web traffic towards the six major areas doubled on September 4, 2022 (see Figure 3). This phenomenon, known as the Streisand effect, could be caused by the curiosity of people on what happened to the platform, which is relatively rare but mainly seen with problems of “freedom of expression” [11]. This suggests that attempted censorships could eventually end up being counterproductive [75]: The disruptive effort aimed at reducing user interactions rather led to the unforeseen consequences of increased attention, despite the darling only a few days before decreasing sharply.
We examine in detail the impacts of the disruption and the resumption of the forum on Kiwi farms in the 6 months of July 2022. This period provides sufficient understanding, because the campaign was mainly completed and the forum increased stable before the disruption. To assess the impacts, we separate the data points observed in the post-construct period (first group) and the pre-lubrication period (second group), divided before September 3, 2022. We then use the Mann-Whitney U test (because the samples are not paired and the data do not follow a normal distribution) to compare the difference between the average classifications of the two populations. The size of the effect – indicating the magnitude of the observed difference – is evaluated by the Cliff delta, going [-1, 1].
4.1. The impact of major disturbances
While some DDOS attacks were large enough to close the forum, their impact was temporary. For example, the
The attack on the DDOS on August 23, 2022 – which was probably associated with the Twitter campaign the day before – led to a drop of approximately 35% in the publication volume, but the activity of the forum recovered the next day at a slightly higher level (see the first graphic in Figure 4). The DDOS attack during Christmas 2022 was also short -lived. The FAI blackholling on August 26, 2022 was more critical, silencing the forum for two consecutive days, but it was further recovered.
The most significant and sustainable impact was caused by the substantial disruption of the industry we analyze in this article. While the activity of the forum immediately dropped by around 20% after the action of Cloudflare on September 3, 2022, the forum was still online on Kiwifarms.ru, hosting the same content. The activity did not degrade significantly before Ddosguard's action on September 5, 2022, which shot the Russian domain. On September 18, 2022, not all areas were available, including. Weion (probably their accommodation was identified); The activity of the forum fell to zero and stayed there for a week. The operator managed to recover the online forum for the first time on September 27, 2022, after which he ran stable on the Dark Web and the Clear Web for about a month until Zayo – a level 1 ISP, finally recovered a second time on October 30, 2022. He was stable for a serious time, except for the blackholing of 222. 70% decrease in activity.
In general, although the forum is now back online in a stable manner, hosted on 1776 solutions – a company also founded by the owner of the forum – it has (for the moment) rebound at the pre -lubrication level, with the number of active users and the display of the volume of half revolutionary. The concerted effort we analyzed was much more effective than previous DDOS attacks, but still could not silence the forum for a long time.
