Cyberattackers use easily available tools to target media sites, threaten press freedom

NEW YORK: When exiled Russian news website Meduza was hit with a flood of internet traffic in mid-April, it set off alarm bells among the staff as the deluge blocked publishing for more than four hours and briefly rendered the site inaccessible for some readers. It was the largest denial of service attack (DDoS) attack in Meduza’s 10-year history.

“We were trying to spin up solutions…everything to continue to write news,” Pavel Manylov, the site’s lead software engineer, told CPJ. “Our colleagues said the website was giving an error message and the content management system was not working properly. It was because of the enormous traffic, something new for us.”

The scale wasn’t the only notable thing about the attack. In their cyber assault, the attackers deployed a suite of online tools increasingly used to target media sites around the world, while keeping the perpetrators’ identities secret.