The Dark Side Of Facebook, Where People Lie, Steal, And Make Millions

 

Business Insider - On Feb. 10, Jason Fyk received a strange Facebook message.

“Bro.”

The message had been sent by someone who wasn’t his friend on the social network, someone using the alias “Anthony.*” It was a name Fyk had come to know and dread.

Minutes later, the traffic on his website, FunnierPics.net, nosedived. Google Analytics showed the number of active readers drop from 3,000 to zero instantly.

When Fyk, known online as Jason Michaels, clicked over to his company’s Facebook page, WTF Magazine, he found another message from Anthony.

“Site’s down :(.”

Fyk’s business was under attack, and not for the first time. He’d spent the past few years locked in ferocious virtual combat over his Facebook pages, battling a shadowy group of adversaries that he and his friends call Script Kiddies, on the assumption that they're young hackers who exploit low-level vulnerabilities on others' sites.

Facebook - Fyk said he received this Facebook wall post right as his site was crashing.

Anthony prefers the name the Community, and he readily admits — albeit communicating only under a pseudonym — that the group’s activities include hijacking valuable Facebook pages for fun and viral fame. (Meanwhile, Anthony and his cohorts refer to the WTF team as the Neckbeards.)

 

One of Fyk’s employees quickly determined that FunnierPics.net was under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) reflection attack. When Fyk’s team contacted the host, GoDaddy, they learned an estimated 70,000 servers had gone dead, resulting in more than 1 million customers losing web service. Fyk’s IP address, GoDaddy confirmed, was the attackers’ target. The others were collateral damage.   Read More