ECD Pelts Fur Merchants with DoS Attacks   2/16/2005 - 3,090 views, 2 Comments

It is doing this by bombarding the servers of the targetted companies with email in an effort to create a DoS (Denial of Service) attack, thereby taking causing the companies’ computers to go offline.

According to the ECD’s website, “The action, which starts today, will, on the one hand hit key institutions in the Fur Trade. As well as that, it will also support current campaigns which are directed against companies which directly profit from animal suffering. Along with Peek & Cloppenburg, The German Fur Institute, Fur & Fashion GmbH, The Fur Commission USA and Maison de Bonneterie, we’re gonna put pressure on those companies and institutions which are responsible that animals like foxes or mink are still kept imprisoned in small cages, only to be killed for their fur after a few months.” [sic]

The site goes on to say that “With Legacy Trading, we’re hitting a small company which makes a profit through supporting companies which carry out animal experiments.”

The target companies reside primarily within the UK and other EU countries, where the law with respect to DoS attacks is murky, if not non-existant.

However, that may not be the case in the Canadian province of British Columbia, where the domain was registered by one Maik Soerensen. Because according to the domain’s registrar, Kaleton Internet, the ECD domain, ecd-fur.com, has been suspended. Indeed, an attempt to visit this domain causes an error.

Not to be deterred from an interesting story, however, your Aunty did a little digging, and turned up an ECD mirror site, which happily displayed the ECD’s DoS generator for Aunty.

The ECD has cleverly set up a DoS-by-email generator using IRC (Internet Relay Chat). When you log into the IRC chat channel, according to the site, “Every word that you say will send a random email to one of the targets.”

In fact, here is the entire set of instructions - it’s very interesting:

“To use this tool please do the following :

1. Replace ‘YourName’ in the top left of the screen with whatever nickname you want to use in the IRC channel (chat room).
2. There are two buttons in the bottom left. Click the left one (it looks like a lightning bolt).
3. A warning will pop up saying ‘An attempt has been made to connect to… irc.indymedia.org’. There will be two buttons; ‘cancel’ and ‘allow’. YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST CLICK ALLOW. It will not work at all if you click cancel.
4. You will now be connected to the chat room. You can talk by typing things in the space just to the right of the green button and pressing enter. Whenever a warning pops up ALWAYS CLICK ALLOW.
5. Every word that you say will send a random email to one of the targets.”

Aunty did everything up through step 4, just to confirm that the DoS generator was still up and running, and indeed it is. Aunty did not, however, type something and press enter, as she did not want her every word to send a random email to one of the targets. While Aunt is an anti-fur vegetarian, she is also, indeed first and foremost, an anti-Internet abuse Aunty.

So, as with the recently panned “Mugu Marauder“, and the “Make Love Not Spam” DoS project before that, Aunty says “you can look, but don’t touch…no, no.”

DoSing is never a good idea, and is illegal in many countries, including the United States, even if it is not yet in the UK and the EU.