 |
 | |
| Type | Social Enterprise |
|---|---|
| Industry | |
| Founded | 2011 |
| Founder | Dmitri Vitaliev |
| Headquarters | Montréal , Canada |
Area served | Worldwide |
| Products | Internet Security, Managed Hosting, Web caching |
| Services | |
| Website | deflect |
Deflect is a DDoS mitigation and website security service by eQualitie, a Canadian social enterprise developing open and reusable systems with a focus on privacy, resilience and self-determination, to protect and promote human rights and press freedom online. [1]
Deflect was founded by digital security expert and trainer Dmitri Vitaliev [2] and Canadian internet entrepreneur David Mason [3] in 2011. The Deflect project predates similar initiatives by Google's Project Shield and Cloudflare's Project Galileo. The initiative was created in response to an influential report [4] by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society which highlighted the prevalence of DDoS as a means of political repression and censorship against independent media and human rights groups around the world, and recommended practical methods to protect websites from future incidents. The company claims to reach approximately 2% of the population connected to the Internet on an annual basis [5]
Deflect offers free services to many civil society organizations and commercial plans for small business and enterprise. [6]
In 2016, the Deflect team released its first investigative report into attacks against a Ukrainian independent media website. ""On the 2nd of February, the Kotsubynske website published an article from a meeting of the regional administrative council where it stated that members of the political party 'New Faces' were interfering with and trying to sabotage the council's work on stopping deforestation. Attacks against the website begin thereafter." [7]
Also in 2016, CBC [8] noted that Deflect thwarted DDoS attacks for Black Lives Matter. Investigations led by the Deflect team to discover the methods and provenance of over a hundred separate incidents against the Black Lives Matter website, were noted in The Verge, [9] Ars Technica [10] and BoingBoing. [11]
In 2019, the Deflect team discovered a persistent cyber offensive campaign against Uzbek human rights activists, leading to a more detailed study by Amnesty International. [12] Other instances of intervention for which Deflect has received recognition for include the Gamergate, [13] the 2012 Rakhine State riots, [14] the 2013 Iranian presidential election [15] and the FIFA corruption conspiracy. [16]
In 2017, Scott Neigh, host of podcast Talking Radical Radio, [17] spoke with founder Dmitri Vitaliev about how Deflect.ca defends social movements against digital threats.
By 2020, the Washington Post [18] reported that Deflect.ca was protecting over 500 vulnerable civil society organizations.
In computing, a denial-of-service attack is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.
Internet activism, hacktivism, or hactivism, is the use of computer-based techniques such as hacking as a form of civil disobedience to promote a political agenda or social change. With roots in hacker culture and hacker ethics, its ends are often related to free speech, human rights, or freedom of information movements.
The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, the center was elevated to an interfaculty initiative of Harvard University as a whole. It is named after the Berkman family. On July 5, 2016, the center added "Klein" to its name following a gift of $15 million from Michael R. Klein.
CyberBunker was an Internet service provider located in the Netherlands and Germany that, according to its website, "hosted services to any website except child pornography and anything related to terrorism". The company first operated in a former NATO bunker in Zeeland, and later in another former NATO bunker in Traben-Trarbach, Germany.
Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.
Internet activism and, specifically, social networking has been instrumental in organizing many of the 2009 Iranian election protests. Online sites have been uploading amateur pictures and video, and Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have been places for protesters to gather and exchange information. Although some scholars in the West stress that Twitter has been used to organize protests, Iranian scholars argue that Twitter was hardly used by Iranian citizens in the midst of the 2009 protests.
Operation Payback was a coordinated, decentralized group of attacks on high-profile opponents of Internet piracy by Internet activists using the "Anonymous" moniker. Operation Payback started as retaliation to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on torrent sites; piracy proponents then decided to launch DDoS attacks on piracy opponents. The initial reaction snowballed into a wave of attacks on major pro-copyright and anti-piracy organizations, law firms, and individuals.
HBGary is a subsidiary company of ManTech International, focused on technology security. In the past, two distinct but affiliated firms had carried the HBGary name: HBGary Federal, which sold its products to the US Government, and HBGary, Inc. Its other clients included information assurance companies, computer emergency response teams, and computer forensic investigators. On 29 February 2012, HBGary, Inc. announced it had been acquired by IT services firm ManTech International. At the same time, HBGary Federal was reported to be closed.
Jigsaw LLC is a technology incubator created by Google. As of February 2020, it is under Google management and used to operate as an independent subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Based in New York City, Jigsaw is dedicated to understanding global challenges and applying technological solutions, from "countering extremism", online censorship and cyber-attacks, to protecting access to information. Jared Cohen, formerly with the Policy Planning Committee at the US State Department, was the CEO of Jigsaw until 2022, and was formerly co-founder and director of Google Ideas.
Cloudflare, Inc. is an American company that provides content delivery network services, cloud cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and ICANN-accredited domain registration services. Cloudflare's headquarters are located in San Francisco, California. According to The Hill, it is used by more than 20 percent of the entire Internet for its web security services as of 2022.
8kun, previously called 8chan, Infinitechan or Infinitychan, is an imageboard website composed of user-created message boards. An owner moderates each board, with minimal interaction from site administration. The site has been linked to white supremacism, neo-Nazism, the alt-right, racism and antisemitism, hate crimes, and multiple mass shootings. The site has been known to host child pornography; as a result, it was filtered out from Google Search in 2015. Several of the site's boards played an active role in the Gamergate harassment campaign, encouraging Gamergate affiliates to frequent 8chan after 4chan banned the topic. 8chan is the home of the discredited QAnon conspiracy theory.
Lizard Squad was a black hat hacking group, mainly known for their claims of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks primarily to disrupt gaming-related services.
Mirai is malware that turns networked devices running Linux into remotely controlled bots that can be used as part of a botnet in large-scale network attacks. It primarily targets online consumer devices such as IP cameras and home routers. The Mirai botnet was first found in August 2016 by MalwareMustDie, a white hat malware research group, and has been used in some of the largest and most disruptive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, including an attack on 20 September 2016 on computer security journalist Brian Krebs' website, an attack on French web host OVH, and the October 2016 Dyn cyberattack. According to a chat log between Anna-senpai and Robert Coelho, Mirai was named after the 2011 TV anime series Mirai Nikki.
On October 21, 2016, three consecutive distributed denial-of-service attacks were launched against the Domain Name System (DNS) provider Dyn. The attack caused major Internet platforms and services to be unavailable to large swathes of users in Europe and North America. The groups Anonymous and New World Hackers claimed responsibility for the attack, but scant evidence was provided.
Ghost Squad Hackers or by the abbreviation "GSH" is a politically motivated hacktivist team responsible for conducting cyber attacks on central banks, Fox News and CNN, leaking sensitive data of the United States Armed Forces, leaking sensitive data of the Israeli government, hijacking Afghanistan's Chief Executive's Twitter account, and much more. Led by the administrative de facto leader known as s1ege. The group's prime intent and focus is embedded on anti-governmental and organization cyber protests within current involvements of media speculation and real life happenings in 2021 to present.They are also a team in and part of the hacktivist group Anonymous.
DarkMatter Group is a computer security company founded in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2014 or 2015. The company describes itself as a purely defensive company.
James W. Mickens is an American computer scientist and the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. His research focuses on distributed systems, such as large-scale services and ways to make them more secure. He is critical of machine learning as a boilerplate solution to most outstanding computational problems.
eQualitie is a Canadian digital security organisation focused on the development and distribution of free, open-source software, services and security training to civil society, NGO's, investigative journalists and independent media to protect and promote human rights and press freedom online. The group is based in Montreal, Canada.
Killnet is a pro-Russia hacker group known for its DoS and DDoS attacks towards government institutions and private companies in several countries during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The group is thought to have been formed sometime around March 2022.