Streamer Clara Sorrenti, known as Keffals on Twitch, has been the victim of attacks directed at her: personal details publicly disclosed before turning into harassment. Everything happens on the Kiwi Farms site, created in 2013, a forum dedicated mainly to cyberbullying. Cloudflare, which provided security services, made the decision to block the forum after specific and targeted threats, such as DDoS-Guard, which the Kiwi Farms team had asked to address. An error message now appears when a web user wants to access the forum in question.
A directed streamer
Canadian and transgender activist, streamer Clara Sorrenti became the target of Kiwi Farms after gaining some notoriety on Twitch. On her channel, she explains laws and political news to an audience made up primarily of LGBTQ teens. She films herself playing video games or simply answering questions from Internet users, she reports on Washington Post. After a streamer who criticized Clara Sorrenti was banned from Twitch in March, Kiwi Farms users created a thread about the streamer that included sexually explicit images of her, phone numbers and addresses.
nbc news explains that Clara Sorrenti was above all a victim of doxing, a practice of disclosing personally identifiable information with malicious intent. After crushing, which denotes an anonymous person who sends false urgent information to the police about a violent crime, in the hope that law enforcement will raid it and may injure the person who is there. Clara Sorrenti thus found herself questioned at her home in London, Ontario (Canada) for no reason. She then had to leave her house for security reasons.
Two successive blocks
The streamer’s campaign against Cloudflare has gone viral in recent days, with organizations and influencers joining the call to ban Kiwi Farms from Cloudflare’s service. A first step was taken on Saturday as Cloudflare blocked access from the servers. In turn, the Russian company DDoS-Guard, which Kiwi Farms turned to after the first block, also blocked access to the site on Monday.
Despite this initiative, Matthew Prince believes that this decision “Risk of not solving the problem and, even worse, of making it worse because Kiwi Farms users feel attacked,” he told the Washington Post. However, forum users will always be able to find alternative solutions to continue their activity.
As a screenshot shared on Twitter explains, CloudFlare as a DDoS-Guard does not host the forum, but instead protects it against “denial of service” cyberattacks that consist of flooding its servers to saturate them and make them inaccessible. By acting as a “buffer” between the site and Internet users, these service providers have the power to cut off access to the platform.
Kiwi Farms was born in 2013 and was launched by Joshua Moon, former administrator of the 8chan forum, a site that hosts many extremist, hateful or conspiratorial comments. The site registers 16,000 daily connections. According to Vice, at least three people have committed suicide after being subjected to harassment campaigns by Kiwi Farms. Members of the LGBTQ community and women are frequent targets.
Since 2019, the site has been blocked in New Zealand, after refusing to pass on information about its users who had posted the Christchurch attacker’s manifesto and video to the forum, he recalls. The world.
Source: BFM TV
