Whodunnit?

According to itself the BNP's website has been hit by the "biggest Denial of Service attack ever", but, as we'll see, not everybody is convinced that the party of American construction workers, Italian grandmas, Polish Spitfire squadrons and Helen Colclough is being completely upfront.

The site disappeared from the internet yesterday evening, after apparently experiencing problems the day before, leading a hysterical Simon Darby to post:

The main BNP website is currently down due to a massive Denial of Service Attack. The site was attacked last night, at one point dealing with 28 million hits, but we managed to block out the traffic which was emanating from Eastern Europe and Russia.

The size of the assault today is unparalleled and there is no doubt that whoever has organised this has had to pay out a serious amount of money to the criminal underworld.

On Friday the servers of Clear Channel, part of a huge conglomerate that provides billboard advertising, suffered a similar attack. Their IT professionals tracked the criminal activity back to a notorious "anti-fascist" organisation openly aligned to the Labour Party and supported by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. This organisation was protesting at the decision by Clear Channel to allow the BNP to display advertising in support of our European Election Campaign.

As a consequence of the criminal actions against Clear Channel we understand that their legal team is currently in the process of issuing writs against the perpetrators which as well as civil actions will involve the possibility of potential criminal charges including racketeering.

I'll keep you all informed about the above.

Now would-be rubber magnate Darby is supposed to be some kind of IT guru and knows as well as we do that DoS attacks don't happen because somebody paid "a serious amount of money to the criminal underworld". They usually happen when a Billy No Mates geek gets a bee in his bonnet, and they're virtually untraceable because Billy No Mates is activating armies of sleeping "zombies" which live on thousands of innocent PCs. The "zombies" flood the target server with so many requests that it can't cope and goes down. That's the simple explanation, but for more read this.

Naturally, Darby can't resist hyping the scale of the "attack". It's "the biggest... ever" and "unparalleled" - in his own mind. A simple web search finds far worse examples.

Equally naturally keyboard warrior Paul Morris, aka Green Arrow, can't wait to get in on the act and manages to out-pompous even himself:

the British National Party membership is made up of the best of the True British people. They do not whine when bombs fall around their heads, they do not flinch when their ammunition is gone and the fight is desperate, they fix bayonets and stand firm.

Somebody should tell the Welsh Windbag to get a grip. This is a DoS attack (allegedly) not Rorke's Drift, and the internet is chock-a-block with examples of the BNP membership "standing firm" by whinging and whining about how hard done to they are on almost every newspaper website and blog in the world.

Anyway, back to Darby.

Now if Clear Channel, the people who brought you the BNP billboards, was under attack on Friday then it wasn't obvious to us, since we accessed the site a number of times throughout Friday and Saturday. And we've yet to hear news of writs and legal actions against a "notorious 'anti-fascist' organisation" issued on behalf of Clear Channel.

Why is Darby so coy that he won't name the organisation "openly aligned to the Labour Party"? Could it be that he's afraid the (real) writs might start flying in the other direction?

We'd also like to hear Darby's explanation of how Clear Channel's IT professionals allegedly managed to track down the source of the attack in a few hours, when such investigations take anybody else, including the police, weeks and sometimes months of painstaking research to solve.

So whodunnit?

Out in Nutziland the theories are coming thick and fast. One nemotode thinks the outage was planned to co-incide with the Archbishop of Canterbury's attack on the BNP, while another agrees: "That is disgusting. Typical of the Reds!" The same microbrain, hearing that the "attack" originated in Russia then ventures: "Russia eh? Maybe some Labour MPs are paying some old commie friends to do some dirty work." Another casts his net more widely: "...why does Lancaster Unity, Hope Not Hate and Denise Garside, Ketlan Ossowski and others come to mind?" (because you're an idiot, A1?)

It would be nice to believe that somewhere in a Siberian bunker there's a man in a wheelchair, a scar on his face and a cat on his lap, spluttering maniacally as he switches the BNP on and off, but there might just be a simpler explanation.

Even in Nutziland several remarked that they'd heard the BNP's servers were due for an upgrade, but a friend of ours posts this:

>>>
...using IPLocator at http://www.ipaddresslocation.org/ip-address-locator.php for the ip address the www.bnp.org.uk had last night (87.117.239.66) I got the following back:

Your IP Address: 87.117.239.66
IP Address Hostname: 87.117.239.66
IP Country: United Kingdom
IP Country Code: GBR
IP Continent: Europe
IP Region: Windsor and Maidenhead
Guessed City: Maidenhead
IP Latitude: 51.5167
IP Longitude: -0.7
ISP Provider: B&P Interative Ltd

This morning however the address seems to be:

Your IP Address: 95.154.192.19
IP Address Hostname: maidenhead-1.wnm.uk.cluster.bnp.org.uk
IP Country: United Kingdom
IP Country Code: GBR
IP Continent: Europe
IP Region: Windsor and Maidenhead
Guessed City: Maidenhead
IP Latitude: 51.5167
IP Longitude: -0.7
ISP Provider: RapidSwitch Ltd

Having offered serveral un-substaniated possible reasons I wonder now whether it is simply the case that they have exceeded the throughput for their hosting package and have had to move to another provider.
...
It will take awhile for a DNS change to propergate so they could appear to be offline for awhile it will depend on how often your isp's dns is updated.

The story of DoS is I would allege a sham and the cover story for the move - and maybe, I mean hopefully their backups are crap and their expertise in re-creating the site is inadequate.
>>>

So then, are we (and the BNP membership) being treated to another hefty dose of BNP BS?

Watch this space, comrades.