For over 30 hours, one of the most popular websites for fan stories was offline due to a hacker attack. The reasons for this are bizarre.
On July 10 and 11, 2023, the website ‘Archives of our Own’ was offline for about 30 hours. The reason was a DDoS attack. The hacker group Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for the attack.
A chronological account of the attack can be found on the official Twitter account of the website:
What kind of page is this? ‘Archives of our Own’ is informally abbreviated as AO3 and is an archive for fan content. It revolves around self-written stories (fanfiction), images (fanart), and more related to all areas of entertainment.
This includes games, animes, music bands, movies, and TV shows. AO3 is operated on a non-commercial basis by volunteers. Overall, there are over 11.4 million works from over 6 million users on the site. There are over half a million fan works just for Marvel.
Who are the actors?
Who is behind the plans of Anonymous Sudan? The hacker group has apparently been active since January 2023 and has been making headlines ever since.
In April 2023, they attacked the website and Facebook account of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and in June 2023 targeted Microsoft and its Office 365 programs, causing several hours of downtime for the applications. Western financial service providers are also frequently targeted by their attacks.
The group poses as an Islamist terrorist group that allegedly acts with religious and political motivations.
However, security experts believe that the group has no connections to Sudan or Islamism. Evidence suggests rather a connection to the pro-Russian hacker collective Killnet. This connection was confirmed in February 2023 (via Flashpoint).
There are also indications that the group consists of state-sponsored Russian hackers who repeatedly attack Western targets. The methods and tactics behind the attacks resemble those of state-sponsored Russian adversaries.
‘Anonymous Sudan is a Russian information organization that wants to use its Islamic legitimacy to advocate for closer cooperation between Russia and the Islamic world,’ said Mattias Wåhlén, a threat analysis expert from Stockholm, to Bloomberg. ‘[The hacker group] repeatedly claims that Russia is the friend of Muslims.’
The abbreviation stands for the English “Distributed-Denial-of-Service attack” and describes a deliberately induced overload of the data network by sending a multitude of requests to the respective website.
The sheer volume of requests causes the site to collapse. Because of the sheer number of requests from many computers, the source of the attack can initially not be blocked.
Why the attack on the fan page? In a statement, the group claims to have attacked AO3 because “the site is full of disgusting stuff and other LGBTQ+ and NSFW things”.
Hackers fail in their efforts
However, the hackers’ plan does not succeed. Early on, the operators of AO3 post a statement regarding the veiled intentions of the hacker group and a call that they do not tolerate anti-Muslim remarks:
In response, they receive a lot of love and support from their community for their ongoing fight against the DDoS attack.
How does the community respond? In addition to supporting the operators of AO3, the community sets up alternative Discord servers where stories and images of their favorite fandoms can be shared during the duration of the attack. Alternatively, they read on other sites like Wattpad. Necessity breeds creativity.
@pianokeyswithh A place to trade fics, make friends, talk about fandoms, finding lost fics and writing fics! 90 members and counting ask to join #ao3 #ao3fanfic #ao3fanfiction #ao3isdown #discord #server #discordserver
♬ original sound – Maddy McKenzie
Instead of hate, AO3 and the volunteers working under pressure there are showered with love, while, of course, simultaneously the first fanfictions about the DDoS attack are already being written.
Among other things, you can already find the first love stories between the AO3 website and the DDoS attacker. Many of these also take a sexually explicit direction. Some other users post homemade awards on social networks stating that they “survived” the outage of AO3.
The site itself assures that no account data was stolen and that for the moment account invitations have been disabled. The latter are needed for new users to register on AO3.
