Cyberattack against South Carolina flag?

[shanen]

Anyone know what's going on there? Try searching for the South Carolina flag, and that is NOT what you'll see in most of the image results. It must be some kind of cyberattack, but I can't even figure out how it's being done, though I can sort of guess who might be behind it--unless some crazies want to frame some other crazies, perhaps hoping to change the topic.

What I can say is that it is NOT a transient, but has been persisting for at least 4 or 5 hours now, and that it is visible in Texas and elsewhere. I dared to peek at some of the severs, and it actually looks like it's changed there, but such a massive server attack would surely be in the news by now... Must be something at a different level of the network?

[eShirl]

1. Not sure what you mean. What image is coming up for you?

What search engines are you getting this on?

[Marrah_G]

2. cresent and a tree on blue?

[shanen]

3. Cyberattack against South Carolina flag?

Google and Bing and even Wikipedia itself. Just tried Yahoo, and it's the same weirdness, though I don't know if that might be a echo from one of the others. Amazon is affected, too. Just found DuckDuckGo is also full of it.

One could suspect that certain authorities are suppressing the apparent success of the cyberattack, eh? I recently read Richard Clarke's Cyber War book, and he emphasized how weak America's defenses are against this sort of thing, but I've never heard of one on this apparent scale.

[Spider Jerusalem]

4. I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're taking about?

the only way to change Google search results is by creating links to something else that give that something else a higher rank for that search term. (Like "Santorum".)

On edit: the state flag of South Carolina is a palmetto tree and crescent on a blue field. The flag of the Army of Northern Virginia went up over the SC State Capitol building in 1961 (for very obvious reasons; it was a statement of racism and a "fuck you" to civil rights activism). Defenders of that flag claim it's about "heritage" and history; South Carolina was the first state to secede, and the Civil War started at Fort Sumter. (But it's really about racism.)

[shanen]

7. As noted elsewhere, my stupid, but...

In my defense, I saw and heard a bunch of stuff about the "controversial" state flag of South Carolina, and this thing just looked dumb. No relationship I could imagine with South Carolina. The moon is everywhere, and that's an Islamic looking moon, to boot. The palm tree is not even consistent but all kinds of variations in it.

Okay, if jumping to conclusions or being a fool were Olympic sports, I'd have a chest full of gold medals. I was sincerely speculating that crazy people were riding the publicity and massively creating fake flags for South Carolina and that they were somehow propagating the fakes all over the Internet.

[mercuryblues]

5. the SC state flag

is not the rebel flag. The state flag is blue with a palmetto tree and a crescent moon.

The rebel flag flies on the state house grounds.

[shanen]

6. That's the REAL state flag?

My stupid, but it's still so funny. Nothing controversial in such a flag, but it was so stupid and unrelated to anything I could imagine about South Carolina, and so unlike any state flag with which I'm familiar, that I really thought it was a cyberattack from someone trying to take advantage of the publicity around this latest racist attack. There were a bunch of stories about the "controversial" state flag of South Carolina, that the results of my searches made NO sense at all.

I'm desperate to make a joke about it, but "latest and greatest" doesn't work. There'll be another mass shooting next week, or the week after next.