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Gaffes, Goons, and Cyber Games

“The [immolated] server, OVH, is the largest in Europe and the third largest in the world. This raises a lot of possibilities for the fire. Further, OVH had continued hosting Wikileaks after it was dropped by Amazon more than a decade ago. This led British intelligence to monitor the company’s CEO.

I’ve been unable to determine if OVH still hosts WikiLeaks, but regardless, payback could still be in play even if the company served ties. In that regard, it’s interesting that the fire occurred a little over a month and a half after a Democrat re-entered the White House. As I’m sure many of you are aware, the Democratic Party and their 2016 candidate have long insisted WikiLeaks was instrumental in their loss of the presidential election that year.

There may have been a more practical reason for the hack than mere revenge, however. The OVH datacenter housed 140 servers used by government-sponsored hacker groups and criminal syndicates, 36% of which were knocked out by the fire. At the forefront of groups affected were Charming Kitten and APT39, two of Iran’s leading cyberwarfare groups. This comes at a time when tensions between Iran and Israel remain high. Certainly knocking out a portion of Iran’s cyberwar capabilities would be a sound opening salvo in a hybrid war.”

https://visupview.blogspot.com/2021/03/gaffes-goons-and-cyber-games.html