The servers hosting Daphne Caruana Galizia’s personal blog have suffered a DDoS attack. Prior to the DDoS attack, Mrs Caruana Galizia said that a fake Gmail account was setup – similar to her personal email address. Sean Newman, Director at Corero Network Security commented below.
Sean Newman, Director at Corero Network Security:
“While the motivations for the DDoS attack against Malta Independent Columnist and blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia’s website are still unknown, media censorship should not be ruled out. News outlets, online publications, media personalities, journalists and their blogs are all especially vulnerable to DDoS attacks, simply because of the content and news stories they publish. Cyber attackers can quickly and easily launch a DDoS attack to interrupt service availability of these sites as a way to silence or shut down an unfavorable individual or news story. Hosting providers of news sites need to be ahead of the game, and consider an additional layer of dedicated DDoS protection to eliminate the downtime and service interruption of a successful DDoS attack.”
