DMCA notice sent to parody site 'ClownStrike' that mocked CrowdStrike, which caused a large-scale outage around the world



On July 19, 2024, Japan time, a large-scale outage occurred due to CrowdStrike products,

affecting 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide and causing major disruption to systems in the aviation industry and other sectors . The operator of the parody site 'ClownStrike,' which was created to mock CrowdStrike's large-scale outage, has reported that a notice of copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been sent to the site.

Clown Services Company - Unregistered Agent, Incompliance, Welfare, Debt Market, Analog, and Imaginary-Risk Solutions
https://clownstrike.lol/crowdmad/



The large-scale outage that occurred on July 19 was reported to have been caused by an update to CrowdStrike's Windows security system 'Falcon Sensor.' On July 26, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz announced that '97% of affected systems have been restored,' but the series of large-scale outages affected various sectors, including airlines, hospitals, and government agencies.

In particular, the US airline industry experienced a large-scale outage, causing delays or cancellations of many flights. Delta Airlines, which was hit particularly hard, said it had suffered losses of up to $500 million (approximately 75 billion yen) in the five days since the outage began, and has announced that it will seek damages from CrowdStrike.

Delta Airlines to seek $500 million in damages after more than 5,000 flights were canceled due to CrowdStrike issue - GIGAZINE



Meanwhile, many comments, images, and videos mocking CrowdStrike have been posted on the Internet, including a parody site called 'ClownStrike.' If you visit the following website, you can see what kind of site ClownStrike is.

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https://clownstrike.lol/

When you access ClownStrike, you will see the logo of CrowdStrike's flagship product, Falcon, with a clown hat on top and the word 'CROWDSTRIKE.'



After a while, the logo will start to change.



In the end, we ended up with an image of a clown and the word 'CLOWNSTRIKE.' Click on the embedded audio below to play some silly background music.



ClownStrike, which appears to be a very trivial parody site, has reported that a DMCA takedown notice has been sent to

Cloudflare .

Below is the notice sent by Cloudflare to ClownStrike. It states that if the content infringing CrowdStrike's copyright is not removed within 72 hours, access to ClownStrike will be blocked under the DMCA. It also states that the company that sent the DMCA infringement notice to Cloudflare was a company called ' Corporation Service Company (CSC) '.



CSC, a provider of business management and compliance solutions, as well as online brand protection services, appears to have sent the DMCA infringement notice on behalf of CrowdStrike. It is unclear whether the copyright infringement report was sent at the request of CrowdStrike or at CSC's discretion.

'Unfortunately, the DMCA is well known for being used by cyberbullying companies to remove content they don't agree with,' ClownStrike said, pointing out that the counter-notification system doesn't work either. Parody is recognized as a fair use right, and the attempt to use the DMCA to remove parody sites is shameful.

In addition, the ClownStrike operator has also put a clown-like headgear on the CSC logo and created a parody logo called 'Clown Services Company (CSC)'.



The report also generated a lot of buzz on the social news site Hacker News, bringing ClownStrike more attention than it did before it received the DMCA infringement notice, with one user commenting, 'It's ironic that CrowdStrike may be suffering reputational damage as a result of having problems with the vendor they hired to protect them from reputational damage.'

CrowdStrike attempts takedown of parody site | Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41133917

Continued
Parody site 'ClownStrike' refuses DMCA removal request from original CrowdStrike - GIGAZINE



in Web Service, Posted by log1h_ik