For those of you who might think me a bit paranoid it was recently noted that Edward Snowden’s Dox about the NSA shows they have an interest in the practice of stalking internet nameservers, referred to operationally as “MoreCowbells”, and for those not familiar with Cloudflare it might be best to start here with Yasha Levine’s seminal 2011 article at the eXiled
CloudFlare’s CEO Matthew Prince made a weird, glib admission that he decided to start the company only after the Department of Homeland Security gave him a call in 2007 and suggested he take the technology behind Project Honey Pot one step further…
And that makes CloudFlare a whole different story: People who sign up for the service are allowing CloudFlare to monitor, observe and scrutinize all of their site’s traffic, which makes it much easier for intel or law enforcement agencies to collect info on websites and without having to hack or request the logs from each hosting company separately.
But there’s more…
From Wikipedia today:
Two of ISIS’ top three online chat forums are currently guarded by CloudFlare and law enforcement HAS NOT asked them to stop
Yesterday I tweeted:
Apparently the NSA makes SPECIAL NOTE of people who talk about exterminating them as traitors. All of a sudden I was seeing retweets by accounts that look quite real but if I scrolled down a way I’d find tweets duplicated by those accounts (Try @williamjones691& @ArinaBibi31 at Twitter). These accounts are apparently taking live accounts of interest and interspersing them with links to ‘news’ at sites such as ‘toptidingsDOTnet’ which research shows is DNS-ed by Cloudflare.
This is how “Honeypots” operate.
My initial tweets when I first noticed the stalking are here. The follow up series of tweets I’m basing this post on, with some more information about one of the stalking accounts, is here.
A link to my Tumblr postings about the topic including info on Cloudflare’s stalking of FergusonAction (contacted via twitter regarding this and never responded), DearPutinDOTcom, and a seminal article on Cloudflare by Yasha Levine of the eXiled.
Wikipedia’s entry about Cloudflare (links to the ISIS note). CloudflareWatch now CrimeFlareWatch “Uncovering bad guys hiding behind CloudFlare”, because those bad guys are mostly honeypots-in-disguise, and Cloudflare is hosting literally a million of them… 1,001,992 to be (almost) exact.
