Imma Chargin' Mah Lazor!!

My first taste of an instance of internet (in)security was when a file-sharing cloud website I used to frequent went down for several weeks from a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. When the site came back up, all the data on it was gone. I had used this website as a storage for my polytechnic portfolio shortly before my laptop died, and up to that point, I had thought it was the safest place I could store all my valuable data. Three years worth of digital creations to my name gone just like that, and all for the smug satisfaction of a bunch of people who didn't have anything else better to do.

That incident taught me two things. One, it taught me to never store all my eggs in one basket. Two, it made me realize that there are people on the internet that existed to cause misery to other people. It really made my blood boil that there existed means to cause grief to people on the INTERNET, of all places. It made me want to find out more about what they did, and how they did it, in order to understand what happened to me and to ensure that it never happened again.

My research into the seedy world of internet vigilantism led me to discover just how insidious people were online. There were actually active online communities where like-minded individuals came up with new and creative ways to disrupt and cause mayhem. One such socially deviant network was 4chan, an open imageboard dedicated to scum and villainy.

  

 pretty much

The users of 4chan operated on the premise that the internet was one big playground, and that they were its biggest children. The internet was essentially theirs to toy with, and that the fallout of their machinations would be wrought on the people unfortunate enough to taste their wrath. One popular tool was a DDoS client known as the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC). The LOIC is a client that organizes muliple concerted attacked on a single IP address into a single focussed beam. That was how my cloud website got hit: someone had the bright idea to blast a large and popular cloud service with a LOIC for “fun”. The result was the infernal termination of three golden years of my academic life. Boo.