The Hackers Lost. Freezenet is Back

The latest effort to silence Drew Wilson has failed. Freezenet is back to being fully operational.

There’s a lot of things in this world that make me throw my hands up in the air as I give a “WTF?” response. One of those things happens to be the efforts by others over the years to silence me.

The specific reasons seems to vary a lot, but they all lead to one general theme. I deliver high quality and incredible content that is incredibly difficult to disprove or dismiss as false. The response to the quality is hardly surprising. I’ve had 20 years to hone my craft. While I never claim to know everything or ever claim to be perfect, I do know that what I put out there is impressive for a one man show.

This has led some people to take some pretty desperate steps to try and thwart what I have to say. In all, I’ve had three SLAPP lawsuit threats, two website shut downs utilizing very underhanded tactics, a suspected social media censorship campaign, social media link sabotage efforts, and now an unknown hacker trying to take me out. Throughout all of that, the efforts to shut me up have collectively failed to put a stop to my efforts.

For the three SLAPP lawsuit threats, all three came from the corporate elite. People with truckloads of cash realized that the facts I was publishing was too much of a threat to their personal interests. So, the only solution, since my arguments were so rock solid, was to use the legal system corrupted by wealth to try and take me out. Each successive effort – with one directed at my site specifically – failed to completely shut me down.

Then there was social media link sabotaging where a certain person would submit links to social news websites and use incredibly defamatory headlines and summaries to ensure that the links in question would never make it to the front page. Luckily, this was easily thwarted when URLs in the buttons simply got changed out so a clean submission could be made.

With respect to the 2 websites shutting down, this was brought about by a shady competitor who was out for complete and total online news domination. As such, there was a multi-year long social engineering campaign to completely destabilize the staffing at the websites themselves. Ultimately, those efforts succeeded as both sites I worked for previously shut down. I knew full well that the hope for them was that I would finally go away on my own. No doubt to their fury, I responded by starting up my own website instead so I could carry on my work.

As the website grew in size, I suspect that part of the campaign involved blacklisting my domain name – again, for competition purposes. So, even more desperate tactics were employed to try and ensure links to my site were never approved anywhere that could be “talked to”. I also suspect similar things happened with my former contacts in the process which is why others refuse to speak to me. This failed to strangle my website out of existence.

Now, there was the latest incident. On November 12, I was informed that my website had been compromised by an unknown third party. I have no idea what the intention was specifically and what reason they tried to break into my website, but what I did know was that the efforts did temporarily lock me out of my own website.

Luckily, the timing of this incident couldn’t have been worse for the hackers in question. Unlike the last several years, Freezenet has strategic investments backing it financially. As a result, budgets have finally been able to open up. In fact, literally the day before I was informed of the site getting hacked, I was looking at premium services to help bolster its presence and security. The money had already been lined up. While I didn’t expect that one of the earliest investments to the site itself would be to have the site cleaned up after the digital break in, it ultimately was where it went in November.

Either way, the malicious code that was placed on the site has formally been removed. Moreover, additional money has been invested in the websites security moving forward. While no security measure is bullet proof, future attempts to break into the website itself is going to be much more difficult. Additionally, over the last several days, I have been working to dump all the additional content that has been missed during the downtime. At this point, the only evidence that this hack even happened at all is probably little more than this post.

In some ways, Freezenet exists partly out of spite. Not just for those who want nothing more than to shut me up for publishing inconvenient facts and evidence, but also for those who doubted me or told me that I was wasting my time doing this. This website was built partly to spite both those who wanted to silence me as well as those who doubted me. So, for those that tried to silence me, let me borrow from a famous Ukrainian saying: “Go fuck yourself”.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.