The far-right web forum 8chan that gained notoriety by adopting a sick editorial strategy seeing the sick forum celebrating mass shootings and other tragedies it is also a known source of child pornography, has been finally forced offline, not as would think by the relevant legislative authorities but by CloudFlare, the San Francisco based cyber-security heavyweights who provide higher
echelon security for high-risk type websites and forums.
8chan was created in October 2013 by computer programmer Fredrick Brennan, often referred to as "Hotwheels" and deployed while he allegedly was having a psychedelic mushrooms trip.
Mr Brennan gave up ownership of 8chan in 2015 and has since called for it to be shut down. Following Cloudflare’s announcement, he wrote on Twitter: "Thank you so much @CloudFlare Finally this nightmare might have an end.” 8chan now appears to be owned and run by Jim Watkins,
a former US army veteran, believed to be living in the Philippines.
In an announcement CloudFlare said it stopped protecting 8chan from midnight Pacific Time (08:00 BST) on Monday [5th August] Soon after, their content delivery network went down after the provider, Voxility took the forums servers offline.
CloudFlare's technology is able to verify where internet traffic is coming from, i.e. distinguishing whether the visitor is a genuine person, or a network of automated bots that is being used to flood
a website. Cloudflare currently provides protection for more than 12 million websites,
Losing CloudFlare’s protection made 8chan vulnerable to a DDos [Distributed Denial of Service] attack, where a website is bombarded with overwhelming traffic which in turn overloads the
servers, rendering the entire platform inaccessible and indeed within a few minutes after the CloudFlare service was withdrawn the site "went down"
A spokesperson for 8chan said it has moved to another security firm, BitMitigate, based in the US state of Washington whose mission statement is "a proven commitment to liberty".
