Feminist and Atheist-Friendly Sites Go Down During Weekend DDoS Attacks [UPDATED]

UPDATE: All three sites are now back online.

Free Thought Blogs, skepchick.org, and Feminist Frequency—three prominent sites in the atheist, science, and feminist-sphere—have been under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack since last night, meaning the sites are being flooded with fake traffic preventing readers from accessing those sites' content. Free Thought Blogs, a network of 35 sites, was the first to come back online on Saturday evening, but accessing a blog on the FTB network requires a five second browser verification from CloudFlare. Skepchick.org and Feminist Frequency are still down as of this writing.

Folks over on Twitter—like media and pop culture critic Anita Saarkesian—were quick to blame reddit. Saarkesian has been targeted by angry male redditors in the past related to her Kickstarter project soliciting funds for her video game series. But no hate-thread related to Saarkesian, or one calling for an attack, could be found on reddit. Searches on 4chan last night and today likewise revealed no perpetrators. A look at another usual suspect for DDoS attacks,  Anonymous, yielded nothing concrete either. Checking out the live DDoS map created by Google Ideas and Arbor Networks showed no attack on US sites that matched the duration of the three web properties. No claims of responsibility, no demands for extortion, nothing: the attacker is a mystery.

Over in a discussion thread started by well-known atheist blogger Paul Zachary “PZ” Meyers, the Free Thought Blog community has taken to speculating that the perpetrator of the attack must be someone in the Men’s Rights movement given all three sites attacked were feminist-friendly. (The men’s rights movement is seen as a reaction to growth of modern, digital feminism, and tends to be hostile towards the feminist movement.) Rebecca Watson, the creator of skepchick.org, has taken to tweeting about the attack under the hashtag #DDoSunday, so spirits are still high despite what appears to be a blatant attempt at censorship.

DDoSing feminist sites is not a new tactic when it comes to silencing women who express opinions deemed controversial. It’s not as popular as plain ol’ regular online harassment (including rape and death threats) of feminists, but its use is on the rise. Back in 2009, Bitch magazine reported on a Anonymous and 4chan attack against various feminist websites, an attack that used DDoS. In the spring of 2013, men under the Anonymous banner DDoS'd Adria Richard’s personal blog and the company she worked for after she expressed displeasure at a bad sexual joke during a conference that resulted in one of the bad joke-tellers, and her, getting fired.

It is also possible the DDoS attack was carried out by a religious conservative, and the Feminist Frequency website was just tacked on to confuse, more than one source inside Anonymous suggested to me. Back in November 2013, hackers tried to take down President Obama’s healthcare.gov website with DDoS attacks, and some fingered conservative groups as the ones to blame.

As for what can a lady do to protect her site full of unpopular opinions? Bitch mag said it best in 2009 when it wrote “the best defense is good tech.” Watson and Saarkesian’s sites at this point should probably enable CloudFlare DDoS protection or switch to a provider that can do so. Every hour they are down is a win for whatever creep force is trying to censor them.