Only Fans hacked by Anonymous Sudan

Anonymous Sudan is raising eyebrows again, this time by claiming to have taken down the online adult content subscription service known as Only Fans.

The Russian-linked hacktivists – who gained attention for knocking Microsoft Outlook and other Office 365 services offline for several days in June – posted about interrupting the adult-oriented content creation platform Wednesday afternoon.

Anonymous Sudan first claimed to have downed the Only Fans website at about 3 p.m. ET on its encrypted Telegram channel.

The hackers first posted a screenshot of the unloadable Only Fans website, a description of the company, and a Check-Host link, presumably to prove the connection for its server’s IP address had been timed out in over 41 countries.

Anonymous Sudan most often uses distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks as their preferred method against its targeted victims.

DDoS attacks flood a victim's server with traffic requests causing its website to go offline, allowing the group to control how long the attack will last.

Anonymous Sudan typically sets its attacks to last between one and two hours. Only Fans was no exception, as the group claimed it would continue its attacks on the subscription platform for 1 hour.

Next, the hackers posted a screenshot from a typical website monitoring site showing the site was knocked offline, as well as a handful of comments from social media about the outage.

Ironically, several of the social media messages posted by the group noted that the Only Fans site was often down, almost weekly, one user wrote.

The London-based OnlyFans platform was launched in the summer of 2016.

Only Fans content creators, the majority of whom are sex workers posting pornographic videos of themselves, earn money from users who subscribe to their content.

Top Only Fans creators can make anywhere from over $100,000 to more than $5 million, according to Business Insider.

Who is Anonymous Sudan?

Anonymous Sudan began making waves in the hacktivist world this past January, beginning with multiple attacks against SAS Airlines over the burning of a Quran.

SAS was first targeted as part of a coordinated Valentine's Day attack against Sweden and again in another ongoing campaign launched directly against the flagship carrier on May 24th.

Besides the attacks in Sweden, more recently, the group launched a campaign against the US and Western Europe, including NATO, in support of fellow Russian-affiliated hacker groups, KillNet and UserSec.

At one point, the three cybercriminal groups claimed to have formed a Darknet Parliament.

Leading up to and following the Microsoft attacks, which garnered worldwide attention for the group, Anonymous Sudan posted claims of successful attacks on US companies UPS, Lyft, Tinder, and several US hospitals.

The group will commonly screenshot its alleged handi-work to show off on Telegram, using campaign hashtags and random emojis.

While no one is 100% sure who is behind the group, it’s believed to be a pro-Kremlin pet project for spreading a pro-Russian agenda.