San Francisco (CA) – AT&T has admitted to blocking the adult-oriented 4chan.org website. According to AT&T, the block was implemented to “protect” customers from malicious traffic and “was in no way” related to 4chan’s controversial content.
“Beginning Friday, an AT&T customer was impacted by a denial-of-service attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org. To prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and to prevent the attack from spreading to impact our other customers, AT&T temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our customers,” the company explained in an official statement.
“Overnight Sunday, after we determined the denial-of-service threat no longer existed, AT&T removed the block on the IP addresses in question. We will continue to monitor for denial-of-service activity and any malicious traffic to protect our customers.”
It should be noted that unWired Broadband also blocked access to 4chan after the provider detected ACK scan reports originating from 207.126.64.181.
“We had no choice but to block that single IP until the attacks let up. It was a decision I made with the gentleman that owns the colo facility currently hosts 4chan. There was no other way around it,” claimed senior network engineer Shon Elliot. “I’m sure AT&T is probably blocking it for the same reason. 4chan has been under attack for over 3 weeks, the attacks filling up an entire GigE. If you want to blame anyone, blame the script kiddies who pull this kind of stunt.”
