World Wide Web War 1 (WWWW1)

[Overdriven]

I didn't see a topic about this, but I figured I would put it here. All of this information was gathered by a user on another forum I'm a regular at, so I'm just posting exactly what he wrote. I've read up on the whole thing, and it was a massacre.

A few days ago, it was discovered by the users of YTMND.com that Bauman had stolen a popular image from their home site and watermarked it. People got pissed and planned a mass invasion of Bauman's forum and chat at 12 AM last night. SA and many other sites who had been theived by eBaumsWorld (as well as LUE and LueLinks) decided to join in, and about 45 minutes before the raid was supposed to commence, people started posting "ytmnd" and pictures of the trinity / prolapsed rectum / the pains all over his forum. The forums lagged and eventually crashed. Bauman eventually got them back up and disabled new accounts from being made, but the invasion continued. A second crash ensued.

At about this time, YTMNDers and LueLinkers started mass-pinging eBaumsWorld in an attempt to make the main site crash. This made the eBaumsworld forum members angry, and they decided to DDoS LL, which was successful for a while. Meanwhile, eBaumsWorld was hacked by an unknown user, Bauman had thousands of empty boxes sent to his home and the eBaumsWorld wikipedia articles was mass-vandalised> Search "ebaums" and click the first result for an example.

Now, eBaumsWorld's forums and chat are back up, YTMNDers are still invading, but in much lower quantities, and another raid is being planned for the same time next week.

1.)

At the start of the invasion, it began with taking over the Ebaums chats completely and infesting all their forums. Soon there were also DDOS attacks springing up form everywhere. The four big players of the attack were YTMND, Newgrounds, Luelinks, and Something Awful.

2.)

There were numerous planning chats on AIM of 'The Raid', as it has come to be known as by many.

3.)

Soon enough Ebaums users retaliated with DDOS attacking Luelinks and possibly the other attacking sites. DDOSing is the only way they could possibly attack Luelinks, since they can't touch the boards themselves. The only thing its doing is causing a bit of lag and temporary errors here and there.

4.)

Many other sites joined in the attack effort, including, but not limited to, 4chan, Fark, Knova, IGN, and the LUE board of Gamefaqs.

5.)

Various people have been downloading the Ebaumsworld site EN MASSE with the help of a certain *legal* toll that does so for them. As a result, the site is always getting constant bandwith drain as people garner every file in the site.

6.)

Luelinks found Eric Bauman's home address and business address. Expect hundreds of thousands of UPS boxes, Mormon bibles, and sex-related materials to be delivered there. It has been rumored theyv'e also found his home phone number. Hilarity ensues.

7.)

As of 2:25 PM on Jan 8, Kenman, notorious hacker and mischief-maker extrodinare, was rumored to be assiting Luelinks in planning other stages of the raid.

8.)

While the Luelinks part of the invasion has been categorised by some as "unofficial" since the boards have rules against invasion, a bit over an hour ago that changed. LlamaGuy, the man responsible for founding and administrating Luelinks, gave what is perceived as a blessing to the invasion. I quote:

"From: LlamaGuy | Posted: 1/8/2006 01:46:19 PM |
I was out all night partying... I got home at 5am and never knew anything happened until rkr IM'd me about all this stuff. I'm just now hearing about all this ebaumsworld crap. Usually I'm anti-invasion, but ebaumsworld is one of my few exceptions to that.

Contrary to popular belief, the reason I don't like invasion has nothing to with getting in trouble. I don't like invasions because they cause headaches and troubles for webmasters and users who usually don't deserve any of that. It's just out of respect I have for other website owners out there. The webmaster of ebaumsworld, however, is a plague on this Internet. He has no respect for anyone else, so I don't have respect for him. Therefore, I don't give a **** if you invade his website or not. The only the I ask is that you don't flood our main board while doing so, try and keep it to one topic.

As for the lag... by the time I got home there was nothing wrong, so I don't know why it was lagging. Every night at midnight my logs roll over into a nice little graph so I can look at them easily. I'll do that tomorrow once the logs for this morning are available."


With this turn, much more Luelinkers have begun to attack than before, as a cluster were afraid of the repercussions.

9.)

The ebaumsworld retaliation has taken a new step, as many people DDOSing Ebaumsworld have crashed into malicious packets designed to crash any pingers. Details as they develope.

10.)

The GameFAQS moderation team denounced the attacking made by Gamefaqs users, which came mainly from LUE, RI, and CE.

It's pretty crazy to read about. Very coordinated, and very nerdy. I somewhat wish I'd been involved, though it's been awhile since I've been involved in networking.

[Mistress Sheena]

Erm....good for them? (Who cares? Some may do, but I do not. And I do not know of anyone who would...)

Edit: I'm not trying to sound mean or anything... but seriously. What does all that have to do with say... anything?

[Overdriven]

I put this up mainly because there is a chance it could spill over into other forums, other sites, and other people's computers.

This is an unofficial list of supposed raiders.

YTMND
Gamefaqs - RI, CE, LUE
Something Awful
Luelinks
4Chan
GaiaOnline
LUE2.org
Gamespot
Gamespy
Fark
LiveJournal
Entensity
Newgrounds
Knova
MySpace
IGN
LivingWithStyle

That's a lot of different sites. Most of which I'm sure members of this site are regulars. Hell, even Myspace was said to be involved.

It could come back to some people, and I just wanted to let anyone who didn't know in.

[Mistress Sheena]

Holy shit, myspace and gaia? Well.. I don't really care about gaia... i don't go there anymore. But myspace? I check that regularly. Well... not really.

And.. I stopped posting in my Lj... again. So.. I guess.. I'm safe?

[Overdriven]

That's what I was trying to get at. Myspace is... huge. And if they're making enemies, even as inept as Ebaum's world is, it could spill over. The owner of the site most likely wasn't involved, but still.

People from Gamefaqs, Gamespy, and Gamespot got involved too. Which I honestly saw coming from simply the number of people who go to their sites.

[Gorath Sodom]

Raine, imagine that this thing explodes so much that ISPs begin going to war with one another. They would set their routers to deny any packets being fowarded from another ISP thus if two or more entities that have different ISPs are trying to communicate, they won't be able to. Something like this would literally cripple the Internet. E-commerce businesses would crumble on a national if not international scale.

[Omega]

I agree with your first assessment, kind of cool, kind of geeky. I'm actually glad that I didn't get involved, because that is pretty gay.

At the same time I also don't expect anyone to get retaliation aside from the people that he has IP's for. I mean is he going to go to a website and try to attack every personal computer user?

No, so I don't think anyone here has anything to worry about, aside from those involved.

[Overdriven]

I don't think he's capable of that either. He's got too many people against him, and so far it seems Ebaum's World is on it's own.

It's like WWII. Just getting everybody into "the know". I'm not too worried about it myself, though I'm glad somebody finally snapped on that guy for theft. It's been going on for some time now.

[King Fenii]

They've even made a site against the dude...

http://www.ebaumsworldsucks.com/

It was sent to me yesterday by a friend of mine. Never knew it was going to get so serious Anyway, if the guy stole something he should pay for it, but I don't know if this is the right way... Also, it shouldn't affect us, and we shouldn't worry about a thing. At least, that would be the most ethical, seeing we have nothing to do with it. Hopefully, justice will be served and it must be left at that...

[Daddy]

Intellectual property theft is VERY serious. don't laugh at it. If you watched that flash video carefully, you'd realise why they're so pissed off. A lot of quality, comedic stuff have come out of sites like SA. Would you like it if a site like ebaumsworld.com started watermarking your stuff without any credit? I'd hope not.

[Yuki-onna]

Eesh, all me other forums are complaining about this as well. Tons have gone up in arms about this shit. *yawn*

I will and I shall destroy them if they get in my way.