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Comment by rezmason | Hacker News Reader

Wild speculation: maybe the attacker's motive was to usher specific Sourcehut hosted repositories to the jurisdiction of the EU.

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On a more serious note, I’m really wondering about the motivations. I see the following hypothesis:

1) Test/demonstration of a DDOS against a random target.

2) Attack against a project hosted on sourcehut to make it unavailable (there was even the speculation of disabling a master repository so an end-user could not check that his own local version was the correct one, thus using it with a security hole or a trojan)

3) Attack against a page hosted on sourcehut (I joke that someone wrote "Putin = Fag" on his sourcehut hosted blog).

4) What else ?

1A) Test/demonstration of a DDOS against a service well know among some circles

5) Somebody very vehemently disagreeing with Drew's (often radical) views. This could also be a simple transphobe, though I expect those people to have far juicier targets to attack.

I’m following Drew’s blog and don’t remember anything particular about trans rights (except some "I condemn those attacking LGBT’s rights", which is not particularly radical). Also, the attack (which had an obvious cost) would have no impact regarding this cause.

So, to me, this is quite unlikely.

It’s more likely than you might think overall, though I’ve seen more of it from the other side of the aisle.

Bored teenager.

I'm actually serious there - school/university holidays invariably bring with them a shitload of fairly random DDoS attacks aimed at ... whoever the attacker feels like.

I don't understand and I don't know where they get that volume of packets from, but I've seen it happen a quite sufficient number of times over the years to consider it as a possibility here.

(excuse the vagueness; if you're ever at the same conference bar as me you're welcome to follow me outside when I go for a smoke and ask for the full story then)

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