Anonymous Accuse US Cyber Firm of Protecting ISIS Sites

Anonymous has accused CloudFlare of helping ISIS bolster speeds and improving their online security.

Hacktivists Anonymous have accused Silicon Valley firm CloudFlare of aiding ISIS’ online presence. (Photo: Reuters)

The hacker group Anonymous, which has declared cyber war on ISIS, has accused a Silicon Valley firm, CloudFlare, of helping the terror group bolster speeds and improve their online security.

CloudFlare provides services to about four million customers, speeding up website loading times and offering protection against cyber attacks. They are responsible for stopping the Denial of Service Attacks, where websites that are overrun with traffic are forced to shut down. CloudFlare stops these attacks. If Anonymous tried to get online and take the site down, CloudFlare’s technology would stop them.

A report has accused CloudFlare of protecting 40 websites with links to terrorism, including 37 that are entirely propaganda sites.

Mathew Prince, CloudFlare’s co-founder, has said that Anonymous’ claims are baseless and he insists that there is nothing to be gained from supporting the terror group.

I’d suggest this was armchair analysis by kids – it’s hard to take seriously. Anonymous uses us for some of its sites, despite pressure from some quarters for us to take Anonymous sites offline. Even if we were hosting sites for ISIS, it wouldn’t be of any use to us. I should imagine those kinds of people pay with stolen credit cards and so that’s a negative for us.

Mathew Prince, speaking to <i>The Register</i>

Saying that a website is “speech and not a bomb,” Prince wrote a blog post, suggesting that what they were protecting was free speech. He added that if they were to receive a court order to terminate service to a website, they would comply with it.

Read the original story here.