A single hacker is taking down racist and homophobic sites one by one

A hacker who goes by the name of Amped Attacks specializes in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS). Unlike some hackers who take out websites and services that many rely on, Amped Attacks prefers to target racist and homophobic bullshit.

A DDoS attack is a common method for taking down a server by overloading it with requests. The end goal is to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users.

Amped Attacks regularly uses #tangodown in his tweets, a hashtag commonly used by the Anonymous hacktivist group, but that doesn’t mean Amped Attacks associates him or herself with the movement. Just as anyone can use a hashtag, anyone can declare themselves part of Anonymous. Either way, no major Anonymous Twitter account has sanctioned this particular slew of attacks.

Today, Amped Attacks decided to take down godhatesfags.com, as you can see in the image below.

https://twitter.com/sgtbilko420/status/656982410245111808

In fact, the site was also his target on Sunday.

https://twitter.com/sgtbilko420/status/655927340426506240

Amped Attacks has successfully targeted and temporarily killed multiple sites (earlier today he apparently even attacked an ISIS-related website, though that appears to have only happened once). On the weekend, he took down kkkknights.com, though the site quickly returned.

https://twitter.com/sgtbilko420/status/655492558173421568

Tomorrow, he wants to take down another KKK site: kuklosknights.com.

https://twitter.com/sgtbilko420/status/656950444447657984

Some would argue that because the outages don’t last very long, Amped Attacks is simply drawing attention to these racist and homophobic sites. To be honest, I don’t see this as a problem: We should be aware they exist.

Plus, knowing that there are people who hate these sites so much that they’ll go out of their way to cause them problems can be a little reassuring for the rest of us.

https://twitter.com/sgtbilko420/status/656622262842478592