FCC Now Says There Is No Documented 'Analysis' of the Cyberattack It Claims Crippled Its Website in May. The Federal Communications Commission intends to keep secret more than 2. The agency claims that it was bombarded in early May with traffic originating from a cloud service, which caused its website to crash temporarily while reportedly receiving more than 1. The agency’s chief information officer, David Bray, stated in a letter on May 8 that an “analysis” had revealed that the FCC was “subject to multiple distributed denial- of- service attacks,” bringing down the comment site and leaving it inaccessible to the public. Those attacks, Bray said, were “deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host.”The FCC now tells Gizmodo, however, that it holds no records of such an analysis ever being performed on its public comment system; the agency claims that while its IT staff observed a cyberattack taking place, those observations “did not result in written documentation.”The agency’s comments came in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Gizmodo on May 2. Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioner Michael O’Rielly” concerning the alleged cyberattack, as well as copies of “any records related to the FCC . Bray’s statement) that concluded a DDo.
The agency cited a variety of justifications in explaining why it was refusing to release 209 pages related to the purported DDoS attack. Some of the records, it said. If you’ve ever wondered how a photographer managed to capture the exact moment of an incredible end zone reception or the instant a bird takes flight, the answer. Twitch darling Dr. Disrespect, perhaps Battlegrounds’ most recognizable streaming personality, got suspended from the game last night after pulling the trigger on a.
S attack had taken place.”A total of 1. Gizmodo on Wednesday—though none of them shed any light on the events that led to the FCC’s website going down. The few emails by FCC staffers that were released to Gizmodo are entirely redacted. The agency cited a variety of justifications in explaining why it was refusing to release 2. DDo. S attack. Some of the records, it said, contain “trade secrets and commercial or financial information” which it deems “privileged or confidential,” citing the Trade Secrets Act. Other documents are withheld in an effort to “prevent injury to the quality of agency decisions,” citing a FOIA exemption that typically protects attorney- client communications but also extends to documents that reflect “advisory opinions, recommendations and deliberations” as part of the government’s decision- making processes. Still, other records concerning the cyberattack were not released because the FCC claimed disclosing them would “constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” citing a FOIA exemption that protects “personnel and medical files” from disclosure.
Bray had previously told reporters that the FCC would refuse to release any logs pertaining to the DDo. S attack because they contain private information, such as IP addresses. Gizmodo, citing provisions of the federal FOIA statute, had requested that the FCC release “any reasonably segregable portion” of non- exempt material contained in documents it felt should be withheld. The agency did not, however, release any documents containing the redacted IP addresses and claimed those records were “inextricably intertwined” with material it could otherwise release.
The material provided to Gizmodo did contain six emails from private citizens criticizing the agency over its position on net neutrality and for further failing to produce any evidence that its public comment website crashed due to a malicious attack. Oliver further directed his viewers to visit the agency’s comment website and lodge complaints about the chairman’s efforts to gut net neutrality—rules established under the Obama administration in 2. Net neutrality proponents say that without it, ISPs would be able to legally throttle traffic on websites that don’t pay for preferential treatment, establishing what many refer to as “internet fast lanes.”The agency has received more than 9 million comments from the public on the topic of net neutrality, according to USA Today. The FCC’s plans to rollback net neutrality—which were endorsed by the Trump White House yesterday—are opposed by America’s largest internet companies, including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Pornhub, Reddit, Dropbox, Yelp, and Spotify, among others.
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