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Calls for investigation into FCC's 2017 cyberattack claims heighten after report

A Gizmodo report on internal Federal Communications Commission emails has prompted a new round of calls to investigate claims that the FCC's website was hit by multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks in 2017 ahead of a key vote to repeal net neutrality rules.

Gizmodo reviewed thousands of pages of internal FCC emails for a report that alleged senior FCC officials falsely claimed the agency had experienced a DDoS attack, in which bad actors flood a website with an overwhelming amount of online traffic in an effort to crash the site. The claims, according to the report, were meant to explain website issues experienced in the net neutrality proceeding's public comment docket.

The delays occurred in May 2017, shortly after an episode of HBO (US)'s "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" aired encouraging viewers to file comments with the FCC on the regulatory overhaul. FCC Chief Information Officer David Bray said at the time that the FCC's website had been attacked by "external actors" trying to bombard the FCC's comment system. Bray said the spike in traffic did not reflect real people attempting to file comments.

Following the Gizmodo report, House Energy and Commerce Committee ranking member Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., said in a June 5 statement that he is "disturbed by press reports that demonstrate a concerted effort by FCC employees to mislead the public in the lead up to its vote to repeal net neutrality."

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, shared Pallone's comments in a tweet, adding that she had seen "no evidence of a DDoS attack" on the FCC's comment system. She continued, "It's time for the agency to own up to what really happened."

Gizmodo is not the first to challenge the FCC's claims of a cyberattack. Immediately after Bray detailed the alleged DDoS assaults, the digital activist group Fight for the Future said Bray's statement raised "a lot of questions."

At the time, Fight for the Future Campaign Director Evan Greer outlined two possible scenarios, both of which she called "concerning." One was that the FCC was being "intentionally misleading, and trying to claim that the surge in traffic from large numbers of people attempting to access following John Oliver's segment amounts to a 'DDoS' attack, in order to let themselves off the hook for essentially silencing large numbers of people by not having a properly functioning site." The second possibility, according to Greer, was that a DDoS attack did occur at the same time as Oliver's segment "in order to actively prevent people from commenting."

Greer called on the FCC to release its logs to an independent security analyst or a major news outlet for verification. Pallone on June 5 similarly called on the FCC to cooperate with an ongoing investigation into the matter by the Government Accountability Office.

Bray, who now works with the People-Centered Internet coalition, a group that advocates for a better online experience, called the Gizmodo report "disappointing" in a June 5 Medium blog post, saying the outlet misinterpreted his emails around the incident.

"Whether the correct phrase is denial of service or 'bot swarm' or 'something hammering the Application Programming Interface' … of the commenting system — the fact is something odd was happening in May 2017," Bray said. Based on the traffic the site was seeing, Bray said he was concerned that in addition to actual people wanting to comment, the FCC was "also being spammed by something automated." His fear, he said, was that this spamming might "deny system resources from actual people wanting to comment on the high-profile issue."

The FCC voted in late 2017 to reclassify broadband as a Title I service under the Communications Act, making it subject to less stringent regulatory authority. As part of that vote, the agency also moved to eliminate its net neutrality rules against blocking, throttling and prioritizing certain internet traffic in exchange for payment. The FCC's 2017 order is set to go into effect June 11, 2018.