The Federal Communications Commission’s Office of the Inspector General could not “substantiate the allegations of multiple DDOS attacks” in a recent report that prompted agency Chairman Ajit Pai to admit a prior claim that a cyberttack against a comment system was untrue.
The alleged distributed denial-of-service attack was said to have occurred when the FCC’s public comment filing system crashed in May 2017 after HBO late night host John Oliver called on “net neutrality” supporters to inundate the site with comments to save the Obama-era Internet rules.
Even as FCC officials first attributed the site’s crash to several DDoS attack, skeptics claimed that the explanation was part of an effort to mask the outpouring of support net neutrality got during the public comment period, prompting the inspector general to conduct and investigation on the issue.
“While we identified a small amount of anomalous activity and could not entirely rule out the possibility of individual DoS attempts during the period from May 7 through May 9, 2017, we do not believe this activity resulted in any measurable degradation of system availability given the minuscule scale of the anomalous activity relative to the contemporaneous voluminous viral traffic,” the report said, per Gizmodo.
In a statement Monday, Pai cast blame on a former CIO, who has been identified in multiple media reports as David Bray.
Pai said he was “deeply disappointed that the FCC’s former Chief of Information Officer (CIO), who was hired by the prior Administration and is no longer with the commission provided inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people.”
Pai also claimed that he was unaware that Bray had provided inaccurate information.
“I’m pleased that this report debunks the conspiracy theory that my office or I had any knowledge that the information provided by the former CIO was inaccurate and was allowing that inaccurate information to be disseminated for political purposes,” Pai said in a statement.
The FCC voted in December to abolish net neutrality rules, which attempted to guarantee that we content was treated equally by Internet service providers. The repeal took effect in June.
