UK coder helps Iranians fight government

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 18 Jun 2009 at 10:36

A web designer in London has found a website he created in his spare time is being used to stage attacks against the Iranian government.

Ryan Kelly, 25, wrote a tool called Page Reboot which automatically refreshes any website at user-set intervals. It was designed to help those awaiting sports results.

However, Iranians protesting the controversial reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad are using it to stage denial-of-service attacks towards official websites.

"Normally we get between 600 - 1,200 hits a day on the site, but I checked this morning and yesterday it had got about 41,000 hits," said Kelly, speaking to Channel 4 News.

"Later I got lots of emails from Iranians saying they were using the application to attack government websites and bring them down. And it was working," he added.

The site had come to the attention of protesters thanks to a set of instructions posted on the Iranian.com website. The attacks have focused on government websites and certain news organisations.

"I didn't really know the situation in Iran well enough to make a judgement call on whether what the application is being used for is right or not. When I took it down I got lots more emails calling for me to make it available again as it's needed in the protests," said Kelly. "I had emails from the Iranian government too, asking me how the application works, but I have not replied to them."

Initially the spike in traffic forced Kelly to take the site offline, but his employers offered to pay the excess hosting costs to allow it to remain up.

Twitter and other social networking sites have also been used in Iran in recent days to document the protests in the country, making use of proxy servers to circumvent the ban imposed on those tools by the government.