The increased traffic appeared to crash the comment system, although the FCC later claimed the problems were caused by malicious DDoS attacks. John Oliver organized a pro-net neutrality drive, directing viewers to contribute. The attack coincided with more controversy over the comment system. вЂњI urge the Federal Communications Commission to end the bureaucratic regulatory overreach of the internet known as Title II and restore the bipartisan light-touch regulatory consensus that enabled the internet to flourish for more than 20 years.вЂќ

вЂњThe unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation,вЂќ the comment begins. The anti-net neutrality campaign seems to have slowed down since yesterday, but at its peak earlier this week it produced tens of thousands of comments - roughly 17,000 in one 24-hour period - and accounted for a significant portion of the total comments. Vickery offered to provide the FCC with the data set But someone appears to have copied the text and automated the spam in another way: Sinchok writes that the spam comments appeared to be submitted over API. CFIF may not even have been aware of the attack, since many of the tools include measures to disguise the source IP address. Typically, those tools are used for account takeovers - seeing if leaked LinkedIn credentials can be used to access a personвЂ™s Gmail account, for instance - but they would have worked just as well on the CFIF form. There are a number of widely available tools for filling leaked data into web forms, letting criminals submit millions of entries at a time. If someone did want to use the dump to manufacture FCC comments, it wouldnвЂ™t have been hard. (CFIF told The Verge yesterday that it was looking into what might have happened.) Someone could either have automated a way to fill out the form, or taken the text and used it in their own spam campaign. The text of the identical comments posted to the FCC was written by a conservative group called the Center for Individual Freedom, which provided a form intended for people to send to the FCC. Developer Chris Sinchok wrote on Medium that a control sample was closer to 31 percent, suggesting the spammers may have been вЂњworking with breach data directly, or with a data warehouse whose lists ended up in one of these breaches.вЂќ Afterward, independent data analyses found that a high percentage of personal information used in the FCC spam - more than 65 percent - overlapped with information in data breaches. The Verge manually examined names and addresses found in that dump, and compared them to the data leak database Have I Been Pwned, finding substantial overlap with the RCM database. The Verge received a tip piecing together a likely scenario involving information gleaned in another, smaller spam dump known as Special K. Some clues suggest those identities were pulled from dumps, or from other, similar databases with overlapping information.

As The Verge reported yesterday, tens of thousands of identical anti-net neutrality comments tied to real names and addresses were bombarding the FCC. But RCMвЂ™s data may have been put to a political use. Often when these sorts of records leak, theyвЂ™re used for fraud. Clues suggest the data may have come from leaks or other, overlapping databases

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