VICE News reports: Early this year, swarms of thousands of bots took aim at the main website for the Palestinian BDS National Committee, with the intent of taking the website offline for good.
The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) employed tens of thousands of unique IP addresses to send a huge flux of malicious traffic to the website. To do it, they employed two so-called ‘botnets’ — basically linked networks of dummy or infected computers that work in unison.
But the committee’s website, bdsmovement.net, wasn’t the only one targeted, raising the possibility that this wasn’t run-of-the-mill cyber vandalism, but instead a targeted campaign by the opponents of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.
The BDS movement seeks to encourage individuals and businesses to end their financial relationship with Israel and any organizations based there, in order to apply pressure on the government to end the occupation of Palestine and improve human rights conditions for those living in the occupied territories.
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