The esteemed online news portal, The Associated Press experienced what seemed to be a sophisticated denial-of-service cyber-attack, a malefactor act consisting of overwhelming a specific website with a flood of data, with the purpose of knocking it offline.
During multiple instances throughout Tuesday afternoon, visitors to apnews.com were able to access the homepage but were left hanging when attempting to click on individual stories. A plethora of anomalies were seen as some pages stubbornly stayed blank while others were littered with error messages. By the following Wednesday morning however, the issue had been duly resolved.
Despite the hiccup, the delivery systems to AP’s customers, as well as its mobile apps, remained unscathed by the outage.
Nicole Meir, a spokesperson for the organization stated, “Whilst we have witnessed sporadic surges in traffic, we are thoroughly investigating the cause.” She added that every time when they believed they had successfully diverted the deluge of traffic from one source, it would persistently pop up from elsewhere.
In an unexpected twist, a group that defines itself as ‘Anonymous Sudan’, pledged their intention to target Western news outlets via their Telegram channel on Tuesday morning. Their claims were supported by screenshots of the AP site and others, implying their successful implementation of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.
According to Alexander Leslie, an analyst with cybersecurity firm ‘Recorded Future’, “Their propaganda strategy is fairly simplistic. The nefarious actors perpetrate a concise attack, take a screenshot as ‘proof’ of an outage, which usually lasts for a brief period and impacts a minor fraction of users, and then declare their operation a resounding success.”
The Associated Press has yet to confirm if ‘Anonymous Sudan’ truly had a hand in the attack.
