All About Texas Right Epik Digital Oceanbrodkin

Texas Right Epik Digital Oceanbrodkin: In early November, the site’s only hosting provider announced that they were going to end support for Epik. At the time of this writing, there is an “Epik Pending Delete” message where the site should be.

It seems that Texas Right to Life (TRTL) has recently switched its domain name servers and registrar’s to a third party company called Digital Ocean after their original service provider said they would no longer offer them service. The switch was made on November 11, 2015, which just happened to be the day after the DDoS attacks against Planned Parenthood. The switch was announced on the same day that Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit against TRTL for the DDoS attacks.

The TRTL whistleblower domain was bought using the moniker “Anonymous Krew”.

For those unfamiliar with the term, an “Epik” is a service that acts as a domain registrar and DNS (Domain Name Server) host. The host may be changed from the registrar’s interface by simply modifying two lines of code in the domain’s A record. It is a simple process that is done on a regular basis by many domain owners.

What should be of concern is the Epik company itself as well as its owner, Gabriel Ramuglia.

Gabriel Ramuglia is a convicted felon in the State of New Jersey. In April 2011, he was arrested and charged with operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. He was indicted on July 14, 2011 accompanied by an Indictment Complaint that was filed on October 11, 2010 when he was arrested. The original indictment date of July 14, 2010 has changed to July 12, 2016.

In November 2014, Mr. Ramuglia was indicted in federal court for his role in a $1.5 billion pyramid scheme under the name Binary Options Global. His indictment was issued after he and his company, Binary Investments Holdings Ltd., were accused of laundering money through shell companies and falsified records to hide their money laundering practices. Mr. Ramuglia plead guilty to one count of wire fraud on May 24, 2015 [PDF].

DigitalOcean is a cloud hosting provider and domain registrar. As a hosting provider, DigitalOcean rents hard drives, processors, and RAM to its clients who typically run open source software such as WordPress, Joomla!, and so on. The company initially started out as a sister company of Etsy called HostRocket back in 2011. It had only one server in data center located in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood before it was bought by London based entrepreneur Ben Uretsky.

The trouble with DigitalOcean as a host for the TRTL whistleblower site is that the company has become somewhat notorious for hosting a number of other high profile sites that have been hit by DDoS attacks. DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks are not new, but what’s unusual about these attacks is that the perpetrators don’t seem to be looking to disrupt or steal data. The aim of these attacks seems to be causing such a flood of traffic against a site’s servers that they are knocked offline entirely. This is precisely what happened to sites belonging to the NYPD, PayPal, MasterCard, and others during the course of December 2014.

The attacks are so powerful that they are able to knock out a site even when it’s behind a cloud web hosting provider. In fact, if the attack is well-organised and timed correctly with other attacks happening on other sites, they can be capable of knocking out a cloud web hosting company that has thousands of servers holding tens of millions of dollars worth of hardware and software.