Art World
Hackers Disable Emma Sulkowicz Website to Censor New Artwork
As artnet News reported last week, recent Columbia graduate and controversial feminist artist Emma Sulkowicz has released her first post-grad, post-mattress art project in the form of a chilling, very-NSFW video entitled Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol (see Emma Sulkowicz Breaks New Ground With Troubling Video Performance, Emma Sulkowicz Speaks Out About Her New Video Performance).
Unfortunately but not unsurprisingly, the website set up by Sulkowicz to display the video and accompanying text has fallen victim to some Internet trolling.
The site was briefly disabled by a denial of service (DoS) attack, in which a hacker or team of hackers succeeded in briefly forcing the website offline.
A still from Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol.
“We can confirm that there was a denial of service attack on Thursday,” Keith Anderson, platform support lead for DigitalOcean, where the site is hosted, told the Guardian. “On Friday there was also a spike in outbound bandwidth coming from the website, likely due to a sudden increase in traffic and unrelated to the attack, so we worked with their web team to resolve the issue and their site is back up and running.”
While Sulkowicz believes the attacks were the work of a troll, she remains committed to the project. The website’s comment section, which currently has over 2,600 responses, has also been a breeding ground for criticism, trolling, and even threats.
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