Those with -set:
(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]).
Link
Abstract and 1 Introduction
2. Deptforming and the effects
2.1. Related work
2.2. The interruption of kiwi farms
3. methods, datasets, and ethics, and 3.1. Discussions on forum and imageeboard
3.2. Telegram chats and 3.3. Web traffic and trends in search of trends
3.4. Tweets made by the online community and 3.5. Data licensing
3.6. Ethical considerations
4. The impact on forum and traffic activity, and 4.1. The impact of major interruptions
4.2. Removal of the platform
4.3. Destruction of traffic
5. The effects of associated stakeholders and 5.1. The community that started the campaign
5.2. The responses to the industry
5.3. The forum operators
5.4. The members of the forum
6. Tensions, challenges, and implications and 6.1. The effectiveness of interruption
6.2. Censorship compared to free speech
6.3. The role of the content -moderation industry
6.4. Policy Implications
6.5. Limitations and jobs in the future
7. Conclusion, Recognition, and Reference
Appendix A.
5.3. The forum operators
The disruption of Kiwi Farms has led to a cat-and-mouse game in which tech firms have tried to close it through a variety of ways while forum operators have tried. We take the forum operators messages from a telegram channel activated after the Twitter campaign, where they posted 107 announcements on the time, mostly about when and where the forum returned, ongoing issues (for example, DDOs attacks, industry blocks), and their plans to fix.
The admins were very active, for example, sending seven consecutive messages on August 23, 2022, most of whom remember the huge DDOs attack that day, see Figure 7.
The second peak was on September 6, 2022 following the removal of the CloudFlare and DDOS-Guard service, mostly about the forum. The number of announcements then gradually reduced, especially after second recovery, with many days without messages. A DDOs attack on the forum during the Christmas season 2022 got the attention of the admins. Their activity is inversely correlated with the stability of the forum; Not much active when the site stands and runs firmly or if there are no new incidents, for example, many announcements were posted in September, late October, and late December 2022, when the forum was under attack and disruption of DDOs as shown in Figure 4.
We take a deductive approach based on the acquired announcements to understand the effort made by the forum operator to restore the service. Kiwi Farms requires DDOs protection to hide the original IP address and avoid cyberattacks, so operators first replaced their third-party DDOs protection to DDOS-Guard, then diamwall, yet these firms also resign in their business. They then attempted to develop an anti-bot mechanism itself based on Haproxy-an open-source software to stop bots, spams, and DDOs using proof-of-work [80] -and claim to be elastic to thousands of simultaneous connections. They also changed the provider of Vanwatech -posted and eventually their own firm 1776 solution, and attempted to route their traffic through other ISPs. They are actively maintaining infrastructure, repairing bugs, and providing instructions to users to deal with their passwords when the forum has experienced violations. Operators' efforts seem to be capable and uniform.
