“Mods and admins can’t stop me!” the user wrote. Below was a string of sexual insults and porn links. On August 13th, someone named HawaiiAPUser posted a screenshot of a failed login attempt, indicating they’d been banned under another name. Politics are prohibited except on a board for discussing light pollution laws. Bieler describes Cloudy Night as generally “a nice peaceful edge of the internet” where moderators have handed out fewer than a dozen lifetime bans in over 15 years of operation. Vice president Michael Bieler estimates that the forum has around 115,000 registered users swapping advice, space photos, and opinions about telescopes. Even at a smaller scale, they can cause real harm - like Goodyear’s request did to the owners of the Cloudy Nights forum.Ĭloudy Nights is run by Astronomics, an Oklahoma-based company that sells telescopes and other astronomy gear. The 2016 Mirai DDoS shut down large sections of the web, hijacking insecure smart devices to create an army of bots. At a large scale, these attacks can be incredibly disruptive. A single forum post was enough to direct a temporarily devastating attack on a small business, while federal computer crime laws meant that same post could now come with life-changing consequences.ĭistributed denial of service (or DDoS) attacks are one of the simplest cyberattacks: they flood a site with huge amounts of traffic until it can no longer serve pages to real users. It’s a sentence that even Goodyear’s victims don’t want him to serve. In December 2018, he was sentenced to more than two years in prison for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But one year later, Goodyear was arrested. His visitors seemed mildly amused by the forum drama, and he chatted with them about his $100,000 telescope collection before they left. “I just went up in, just the heat of the moment.” “I was just, like, what the fuck am I being banned for? I was just pissed,” he told his visitors - one from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and another from the Los Angeles Police Department.
In a sudden rage, he’d spammed the site with pornography, then posted its address on a site called, asking for someone to attack it. One of his accounts had been banned a couple of weeks ago, he said. Goodyear swore innocence at first, but after increasingly pointed questioning, he confessed.
Astrometry forums Offline#
Now, someone had taken the forum offline with a denial-of-service attack, and the evidence pointed to Goodyear. The 42-year-old IT specialist and avid stargazer had frequented an astronomy forum called Cloudy Nights. When the FBI appeared at David Goodyear’s doorstep in August 2016, they started asking him about telescopes.
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