Who is spending money to take the Blog da Cidadania offline?

Since last Saturday (9), the Blog da Cidadania started to go offline intermittently and the problem increased until Tuesday afternoon (12), when the page practically went offline completely and only returned to full operation in the early hours of this Wednesday.

When the company hosting the blog was contacted, the initial "diagnosis" was that the page's audience had increased significantly and, therefore, it would be necessary to purchase more "memory," meaning paying the company to increase the page's capacity to receive visits from potential readers.

No measure like that was sufficient. More memory was purchased, but it didn't help. The more memory, the more fake "audience" that exhausted the page's capacity.

The blog's private technician – who does not work for the company that hosts the page – was out of São Paulo for the holiday and only returned to work on Monday afternoon, when he detected that what was happening was, in fact, a "denial of service attack," also known as a DoS attack.

This means an attempt to make a system's resources unavailable to its users, in other words, to make the blog "crash".

This is done as follows: whoever wants to "take down" a particular website HIRES – that is, pays – to create a server – preferably outside the country – and install a "robot" – a program – on it that sends access requests to the attacked website, but in an immense quantity.

Thousands of access requests are sent by the "bot" to that website, and it ends up "crashing" due to excessive demand.

This has been happening against the Blog da Cidadania since Saturday until the present moment. Several dozen servers were hired to send thousands and thousands of access requests to the page, which is why it has been intermittently going offline since last Saturday.

Last Tuesday afternoon, the problem worsened and the blog went offline for good.

Here are some IP addresses (computer addresses) and websites from which the attacks have been made.

185.62.188.91

185.62.188.98

118.123.14.86

80.82.78.96

89.248.171.135

37.115.185.56

14.33.247.130

136.243.36.80

185.62.188.91

185.62.188.98

hosted on: blazingfast.io

This is just a small example of how many machines were sending uninterrupted access requests to the blog, overloading it and taking it offline. There's much more.

As a precaution, on Tuesday night the Blog's technician took the page offline to prepare the system to try to prevent further attacks, but also to gather information about who is attacking.

Since it's unknown how much money the perpetrator intends to spend, it's uncertain whether the page will be taken down again. The defensive structure has already been reinforced, but, as mentioned before, if the saboteur has a lot of money to spend, this will never stop.

Clearly, this is being done to prevent the Blog da Cidadania from continuing to operate. Someone is feeling very bothered by what is published here and is sparing no resources – especially financial ones – to crush freedom of expression.

Since there is no accusation that can be made against the author of this page, whoever is promoting this attack has literally resorted to violence.

Let's understand what's happening. Using a very appropriate metaphor, it's as if someone felt very bothered by what a small newspaper publishes and sent a bunch of thugs to invade that newspaper and smash everything there.

We're talking about censorship, an attack on freedom of expression that uses economic power, since each server used costs around 50 reais to hire, and there were dozens.

There's another way to do this without spending money. Whoever wants to take down the site can hack into other servers and carry out this type of action from there. But that requires a very good technician, who has to be very well paid, which might end up being even more expensive.

The final question is the one that titles the text. Who would go to so much trouble just to take a blog like this down? Who is this page bothering so much?

It's not difficult to know who the people or groups are that feel bothered by what is published here. Just read the blog and draw your own conclusions. There aren't that many possibilities.

Whoever is attacking this page is committing a crime. This crime will obviously be reported to the specialized internet crime division in the coming days. However, that won't be enough. A police report alone isn't sufficient to make things move forward.

The other step to be taken will be to file a complaint with the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office and another with the Federal Police.

Will the investigation proceed? Are these institutions concerned about attacks on freedom of the press and expression? We will find out soon.

What is happening is in the interest of everyone who defends these freedoms. Today it's this website, tomorrow it will be yours. Oh, but I don't have a website, blog, nothing. But you must have a profile on a social network. If you become relevant in any way, similar methods will be used to silence you.

What you can do in defense of freedom of expression, thought, and the press is to publicize this complaint and publicly repudiate initiatives like those trying to take the Blog da Cidadania offline.

Finally, it's worth saying that it's regrettable that Brazil is being subjected to actions like the one described above. Thousands and thousands of attacks like this are carried out every day around the world, but not for concrete political reasons. The reported case is very specific.

Someone is spending money that will never be recovered just to silence someone – in this case, this blog. This is equivalent to hiring a thug to beat or even kill someone because you don't like what they think or say. This is a reflection that needs to be made.

Could this problem also be yours?