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FCC Emails Show Agency Spread Lies to Bolster Dubious DDoS Attack Claims

As it wrestled with accusations about a fake cyberattack last spring, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) purposely misled several news organizations, choosing to feed journalists false information, while at the same time discouraging them from challenging the agency’s official story.

gizmodo.com|Dell Cameron

• Ajit Pai, FCC Commissioner
• David Bray, FCC’s chief information officer from 2013 until June 2017. He was the anonymous source behind reports that the FCC had been “hacked” in 2014
• Mark Wigfield, the FCC’s deputy director of media relations
• Michael Krigsman, columnist for ZDNet

Internal emails reviewed by Gizmodo lay bare the agency’s efforts to counter rife speculation that senior officials manufactured a cyberattack, allegedly to explain away technical problems plaguing the FCC’s comment system amid its high-profile collection of public comments on a controversial and since-passed proposal to overturn federal net neutrality rules.

The FCC’s system was overwhelmed on the night of May 7, 2017, after comedian John Oliver, host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, directed his audience to flood the agency with comments supporting net neutrality. In the immediate aftermath, the agency claimed the comment system had been deliberately impaired due to a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). Net neutrality supporters, however, accused the agency of fabricating the attack to absolve itself from failing to keep the system online.

“The security team was in agreement that this event was not an attack,” a former FCC security contractor told Gizmodo of the 2014 outage. “The security team produced no report suggesting it was an attack. The security team could not identify any records or evidence to indicate this type of attack occurred as described by Bray.” The contractor’s statements were supported by Sohn and confirmed by two other sources with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named or quoted.

In several emails, the FCC encouraged journalists to compare the 2017 incident to a DDoS attack on the Pokémon Go mobile game a year before. Michael Krigsman, a columnist for ZDNet, took the bait, despite the FCC continuing to withholding any proof an attack occurred. Krigsman wrote, unqualifiedly: “It’s similar to the distributed denial of service attack on Pokemon Go in July 2016.”

• Read the full collection of FCC emails.
• “Alternative Facts:” FCC E-Mails Reveal Agency Lied About Denial-of-Service Attack,  Stop the Cap!
• FCC Now Says There Is No Documented 'Analysis' of the Cyberattack It Claims Crippled Its Website in May, Gizmodo
• FCC Commissioner Says Her Agency Is Now Just A Giant Rubber Stamp For Sinclair Broadcasting, TechDirt
• Reporter manhandled by FCC guards because he asked FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly a question, The National Press Club