
‘Spiderman’ Hacker Daniel Kaye Took Down Liberia’s Internet - barli
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-12-20/spiderman-hacker-daniel-kaye-took-down-liberia-s-internet
======
bsanr2
>An Israeli/American-owned telecommunications company tries to oust the
dominant Liberian-owned company in Liberia, using unsavory tactics meant to
shame and humiliate the latter and its users, eventually hoping to sell out to
a French telecommunications giant. Oh, and then they just straight-up
hack/DDOS them.

I'd like to introduce the term "neo-colonialism" to the discussion.

~~~
throwaway_tech
>I'd like to introduce the term "neo-colonialism" to the discussion.

I am curious if you are aware of the context of colonialism with respect to
Liberia.

Oddly, many aren't aware, but Liberia was founded as a colony by the American
Colonization Society in an attempt to return freed slaves back to Africa.

Although the number of US slaves that colonized Liberia was pretty limited in
number (and a minority compared to the number of natives) they took power, and
the Country has essentially existed in a state of civil war between the freed
slaves (colonists) as minority rulers and the natives who did not view the
freed US slaves as Africans.

~~~
bsanr2
I am. As another user mentioned, Liberia was essentially colonized by a
Western power. It's a shocking example of the virulence of the culture of
exploitation that pervaded the Americas at the time.

~~~
throwaway_tech
>It's a shocking example of the virulence of the culture of exploitation that
pervaded the Americas at the time.

Well I think there were both good and bad intentions.

For example, you have Lincoln who of course most would consider an advocate of
the abolition of the practice of slavery in the US. And Lincoln supported the
American Colonization Society initially, even into the War, but eventually
changed his position after speaking with African-American soldiers in his Army
(imagine that a politician changing their position on a matter without being
ridiculed as a flip-flopper).

On its face without knowing more I think one might think establishing a colony
in Africa for freed slaves may have been a noble cause, like Lincoln did at
one time, and its not like there weren't a few thousand who took the offer.

Now in practice of course the Whites from the American Colonization Society
were the rulers and then the power shifted to the freed US slaves, but of
course to the local population they weren't fans of their colonizers white or
black.

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yesbabyyes
This was a quite interesting and enlightening read! I was in Liberia at the
time, from December 2016 through June 2017, doing a project for the Liberia
Ministry of Health, and got acquainted with some people working for Cellcom. I
also gained a great friend in one member of my team, who later worked briefly
for Lonestar and is now employed by Orange. There aren't that many
opportunities for a young developer in Liberia outside of NGOs (fickle) and
the telecoms. Obviously I forwarded the article to him (coincidentally, Israel
is his name).

Liberia's history is quite interesting indeed, and I actually like to compare
it with the state of Israel -- both are the result of an unholy alliance of
people wanting to help, on the one hand, and get rid of, on the other, another
people in "their" land: African descendants in the USA, and Jewish people in
Europe.

I went back to live in Liberia for three months earlier this year, to try and
trace some ancestors of a family member. Things are dire, indeed, with an
economy hit hard by the Ebola crisis, on top of years of military rule, civil
war, corruption and abuse.

Apart from being used for resources, mainly by Firestone (now Bridgestone) for
rubber, but also iron (Arcelor Mittal) and gold (large parts of which is being
smuggled to UAE), it remains a strategic interest for the US (their presence
is still huge, with CIA's only listening post in Africa), meanwhile trade is
controlled by the Indian and Lebanese communities.

Also of interest is that some Cherokee opted to join the free African
Americans, with one ending up a chief of the Vai tribe, and possibly inspiring
the Vai script with knowledge of the Cherokee script, recently posted here on
HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737230)

~~~
jngreenlee
>CIA's only KNOWN listening post in Africa

~~~
yesbabyyes
Point taken.

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throwaway666555
Throwaway for obvious reasons. Around 13 years ago when I was a lot younger we
were in fight with other site community, none of it was for profit. We got hit
by DDOS so we wanted to retaliate. We've scanned their DDOS boxes and found
out the software that was running on them and vulnerability that they were
using, then we hacked that box, got their tools because all was transferred
without any encryption (different times). We wrote our own C&C software and
started gathering our own botnet. Most of the bots were coming from
datacenters so they had high bandwidth pipe. That community we were fighting
with moved to offshore hosting in Malaysia. I've used our whole botnet and
started DDOSing, oh man, I didn't know what kind of power we had. Whole
country (Malaysia) was cut off the rest of the world for hours. Fun times,
some teenager from some place in the world can cut off whole country from
internet by executing one command.

~~~
boring_twenties
Did they stop fucking with you after that?

------
netsharc
An interesting aspect is how broken the Internet is (those dodgy routers and
IP webcams, what other IoT devices can be exploited?), and how critical it
actually is, if you can cripple a whole country's economy.

~~~
lopmotr
It's not really illustrative to call it a "whole country's economy". Liberia
has the same population as LA but only one third of one percent of the GDP. So
of course it's not going to be able to afford the protections that a typical
country can.

------
tlhunter
There's a typo in the title; the hacker is known as 'Spdrman', not
'Spiderman'.

------
kpetermeni
Yes, this is an example of [https://xkcd.com/386/](https://xkcd.com/386/) so
I'm creating an account on HN for the first time.

> The attack against Liberia began in October 2016. More than a half-million
> security cameras around the world tried to connect to a handful of servers
> used by Lonestar Cell MTN, a local mobile phone operator, and Lonestar’s
> network was overwhelmed. Internet access for its 1.5 million customers
> slowed to a crawl, then stopped.

On a more serious note,this is seriously exaggerated. Internet
penetration(mostly mobile broadband) was 21% during this period and was split
between LoneStarCell, Cellcom, the govt carrier - Libtelco and smaller ISPs.
For a population of 4.5m people, 21% meant each mobile operator had less than
500k Internet subscribers.

The post-apocalyptic description of the impact of the DDoS doesn't fit the
feeling in that period ( Nov '16). Friends from outside Liberia reached out
(ironically over WhatsApp) to ask whether Liberia's Internet was cut off. I
checked and saw international media reporting an Internet shutdown which was
even more confusing. After emailing a couple of friends at various ISPs and
the regulator, I finally got confirmation that LoneStar was under attack.
Apparently, they were keeping it a secret. It did not make national news for
another 2 months until the formal complaint and lawsuits were filed. Mobile
broadband was very patchy back then so perhaps people just assumed it was the
usual state of affairs. Now, we have LTE on both operators and an upcoming
pre-5G operator.

Source: I'm from and have been based in Liberia (2015-present) and used to
manage services at the national Internet exchange during that period.

National Regulator: [http://www.emansion.gov.lr/doc/CONSULTATION-
DOCUMENT.pdf](http://www.emansion.gov.lr/doc/CONSULTATION-DOCUMENT.pdf)
Export.Gov: [https://www.export.gov/article?id=Liberia-
Telecommunications...](https://www.export.gov/article?id=Liberia-
Telecommunications-Services) Twitter Thread:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/tksiakor/status/79486360223055872...](https://mobile.twitter.com/tksiakor/status/794863602230558720)

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barli
Actually hacker related stuff..

~~~
Pigo
I'm going to break out my roller blades and watch Hackers this weekend.

~~~
telesilla
Sneakers has a better storyline..

------
barli
I read some more info on him from Krebs' blog. Here's a Apache tomcat vulnscan
script that he wrote when he was around 19 years old:

[https://www.binaryvision.co.il/wp-
content/uploads/2011/01/to...](https://www.binaryvision.co.il/wp-
content/uploads/2011/01/tomcat-scan.tar.gz)

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faitswulff
Note that this has nothing to do with the hack of the Spiderman movie
documents circa 2015.

------
barli
Those of you who worked at Facebook/Google, wouldn't he make more money by
simply being L5-L8 at one of those firms?

~~~
edm0nd
For us non-FANG ppl, what does L5-L8 mean? Are those cybersec job role
classifications?

~~~
maxvu
I think [https://www.levels.fyi/](https://www.levels.fyi/) gives these
classifications.

