Archive of Our Own, the most popular fanfiction website, is reportedly under a DDoS attack by Russians

On July 10, over 4,000 AO3 users reported in the US reported trouble accessing the website in the afternoon. Since Monday morning, the website has been suffering from outages. Later, on July 10, AO3 tweeted that the site was under a DDoS attack.

What is a DDoS attack?

A ‘Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack’ is a malicious attempt to make the target server unavailable. It is a cybercrime in which the perpetrator floods a server with internet traffic. The excessive superfluous requests overload the server resulting in the disruption of legitimate requests. Thus, the unmanageable amount of requests leaves the server unusable.

Who are the attackers?

Another tweet by AO3 revealed that the attackers were “a collective of religiously and politically motivated hackers” known as ‘Anonymous Sudan’. This group of hacktivists is allegedly an Islamist terrorist gang. However, in another tweet, AO3 cautioned “cybersecurity experts believe the group claiming responsibility is lying about their affiliation and reasons for attacking websites.”
“View the group's statements with skepticism.”

Security experts believe that Anonymous Sudan is actually a Russian hacking gang seeking to cause trouble for Moscow’s enemies in the West. Louise Ferrett researcher at cybersecurity vendor Searchlight explained to Tech Monitor that, “The original Anonymous Sudan collective was first seen during the 2019 political instability period in Sudan.”

“This group was anti-Russia and active in local street protests as well,” she added.

However, the current iteration of the group attacking AO3 “appears to be aligned with Russia” and is posing as the Sudanese Islamist gang as a cover for their actions.

Anonymous Sudan claimed that it attacked AO3 because it is, “against all forms of degeneracy, and the site is full of disgusting smuts and other LGBTQ+ and NSFW things.”

Initially, the group stated that the first attack would last up to 24 hours. Now it is asking for a ransom of $30,000 in Bitcoin and has threatened to continue hitting AO3 for “weeks” if it fails to comply. However, AO3 is a non-profit endeavor that is supported solely by contributions and is run by volunteers.

Meanwhile, AO3 has made it explicitly clear that, regardless of the circumstances, it does not condone anti-Muslim sentiments. The latest Twitter update by AO3 reported that the volunteers are still “working to mitigate the DDoS attacks.”

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What is AO3?

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is currently the most popular website for fan-created content. The fansite is a non-profit online archive for fanworks contributed by users. It is well-known for its vast repository of fanfictions. It was founded by the Organization of Transformative Works and currently hosts more than 11,050,000 works in over 57,840 fandoms.

AO3 is widely praised for its user-friendly interface. It follows a comprehensive system of labelling and categorization of works known as ‘Tags’. These tags allow users to filter works according to their preferences. AO3 maintains a policy of “maximum inclusiveness” and allows the publication of any work as long as it is legal.

Since the website also allows content based on controversial or taboo topics, it is often considered “offensive”. However, the tags ensure that the work contains all necessary trigger or content warnings, allowing users to only view what they are comfortable with. Furthermore, its users argue that AO3 provides them with a safe space to indulge in their creativity.

In 2013, Times listed AO3 under the 50 best websites and described it as, "the most carefully curated, sanely organized, easily browsable and searchable nonprofit collection of fan fiction on the Web". Archive of Our Own was also awarded a Hugo Award in the category of Best Related Work in 2019.