Feminist Site Femsplain Taken Down by DDoS Attack on International Women’s Day of All Days

Because we apparently can’t have nice things without someone else getting all upset about it, Femsplain, a Kickstarter-backed feminist website founded by Amber Gordon, was taken offline for hours by a DDoS attack—on International Women’s Day.

We literally can’t even have one single day for women without this:

Gordon told The Daily Dot that a Femsplain contributor sent her a message around 1PM EDT on Sunday to say that the site was unavailable, and it remained down for 3 hours due to the attack.

This is what a DDoS attack looks like in case you were wondering. pic.twitter.com/0xS9KzvGqn

— Amber (@missambear) March 8, 2015

It’s still unknown who was responsible for the attack and what the reasoning was behind it, but we’ve got some pretty good guesses. When we reached out to Gordon for comment about the responsible party, motivation behind the attack, and security measures for the future, she told us,

At this time we’re still trying to trace the origin of the attack but we’ve found one IP address that’s based in the UK and also a referral from 4chan.

I believe it was an organized attack meant to happen on IWD. Many malicious tweets were sent to our account on social media using the IWD hashtag. We experience attacks like these often but never to this scale.

We’ve set up better protection so hopefully this won’t happen again in the future. The website is currently self funded until we receive the funds from our recent successful Kickstarter, so right now it’s only as much as I can afford.

I’m most happy that our community came together and expressed how this wasn’t okay while standing by us throughout the 3 hours we were down.

And speaking of that wonderful community togetherness, when you’re on the wrong side of history, every move you make just promotes the opposite side. Look what you’ve done, misogynists:

People DDOS’d @femsplain today because it’s #IWD2015. I felt compelled to donate as a response, and you should too http://t.co/XlEW2gKZ25

— Andrew Losowsky (@losowsky) March 8, 2015

I hadn’t heard about @femsplain until it was DDoS attacked today. Now 370,000 more know about it, too. Well played, misogynists!

— Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer) March 8, 2015

someone launched a DDoS on @femsplain today bc self-love & positivity are genuinely terrifying to some very sad people #standwithfemsplain ✊

— Lady Dave Murderface (@itsa_talia) March 8, 2015

in case you’re one of those people that thinks international women’s day is stupid, @femsplain is being DDOS’d, women are a literal target

— taylor loren (@taylrn) March 8, 2015

As a wise Jedi once said, “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

(via The Daily Dot)

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