Hacker collective Anonymous declared war on ISIS following the Paris terror attacks, and has now accused a Silicon Valley startup of protecting the militant group.
CloudFlare keeps websites online by protecting them from overwhelming traffic. It serves as protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks which aims to bring down a website by overloading them, a method commonly used by By the hacker group.
Anonymous says CloudFlare is assisting ISIS by protecting websites
The company has a non-discriminatory policy when it picks clients, and now Anonymous members have taken to Twitter to claim that it is keeping ISIS websites online.
@CloudFlare Stop Protecting #ISIS Websites We Are #Anonymous We Are Legion We Do Not Forgive We Do Not Forget Expect Us!
— #OPPARIS ANONYMOUS (@OpParis_) November 15, 2015
Now CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince has defended the company, accusing Anonymous of hypocrisy.
“I did see a Twitter handle said that they were mad at us,” he told The Register. “I’d suggest this was armchair analysis by kids — it’s hard to take seriously. Anonymous uses us for some of its sites, despite pressure from some quarters for us to take Anonymous sites offline.”
CloudFlare CEO defends company policy
He went on to claim that the company most likely derives no benefit from ISIS sites. “Even if we were hosting sites for ISIS, it wouldn’t be of any use to us … I should imagine those kinds of people pay with stolen credit cards and so that’s a negative for us,” he continued.
Prince then said that a proper legal bid to have sites shut down is the only way that CloudFlare would stop protecting websites, although the authorities usually want to keep sites online in order to monitor them.
“Individuals have decided that there is content they disagree with but the right way to deal with this is to follow the established law enforcement procedures. There is no society on Earth that tolerates mob rule because the mob is fickle,” he added.
According to Bloomberg CloudFlare is worth over $1 billion and is predicted to go public in 2017. Prince said that the company could be worth as much as $7.8 billion by the time of its IPO. Members of Anonymous may be angry at the company, but for now it appears that CloudFlare has the law on its side.
