> GATEWAY: “Ability to artificially increase traffic to a website.”
Are they actually just talking about DDoS here? It seems an unusually euphemistic description if so, given how plin-spoken a lot of the previously published documents are.
And if not, why would they want or need to increase traffic? I'm puzzled.
I think they mean things like artifical visitor inflation. For example, to make a Youtube video "viral" they could seed it with 30,000 fake views. Or, perhaps, they could mass upvote certain HN threads as soon as they're posted...
Remember that intelligence agencies generally care more about exploitation (figuratively) and manipulation than attack.
1) increase traffic on articles that favor topic X (one the government likes). The publisher (owner of site) perceives it as public's interest, and adds more articles on X.
2) make some independent pro-government site appear more popular than it is. This could enabled ad money to come its way (including from state ad campaigns), as an indirect method of funding it.
Perhaps if you are a terrorist organisation using the Internet to spread propaganda, believing a particular medium is reaching a wide audience, you might be more inclined to continue publishing via that medium. Of course, all of the content falls directly into the laps of GCHQ and the NSA.
Are they actually just talking about DDoS here? It seems an unusually euphemistic description if so, given how plin-spoken a lot of the previously published documents are.
And if not, why would they want or need to increase traffic? I'm puzzled.