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Stephen Oliver edited this page Aug 13, 2016 · 1 revision

For a theoretical discussion of what is possible, see the FAQ section on attacks.

This page lists actual hostile attacks which we are reasonably confident have occurred, against the network or against our infrastructure.

Ages ago

China's Golden Shield has blocked our website since time immemorial, along with any other site containing the term "Freenet". There are many meanings of "Freenet", and it seems all of them are bad from their perspective. This includes both keyword blocking and DNS poisoning (dyndns IPs are also scrambled, which affects some of our users).

August 2005

Link layer: Testing shows the Golden Shield blocks Freenet 0.5 outgoing connections (this is not NAT, we could connect, but the connections got killed when they sent the 0.5 session bytes). If we told you more, we'd have to kill you. :)

Most of 2007

Frost: Spam on various boards. Anonymous floods, signed floods, Message of Death attacks (some zeroday i.e. discovered by spammer), duplicating real messages on different boards, most recently an ALICE bot answering every post from others.

Strangely enough the spammer isn't attempting to flood the boards, the attack does however make life extremely difficult for newbies.

Experienced users can turn off CHECK and only see messages from their friends, and which their friends have replied to.

The strategic effect is to choke off the flow of newbies into Frost, without making it such an urgent issue that it is immediately dealt with.

2011

United States law enforcement appears to have identified pedophile(s) on Opennet:

http://www.thedickinsonpress.com/news/north-dakota/3885239-predators-police-online-struggle

If true, this is neither new nor particularly unexpected; we know it is possible to identify Opennet users downloading specific files by connecting to every node.

This has been documented for many years. Also, leaked presentations in 2015 show police have tools for monitoring Freenet using modified versions of fred along with external software for analysis, provided by private contractors.

Note that attacks on Tor have been documented around the same time too, see here

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