14 DAY TRIAL // Over the past weekend, a number of four news website owned by Greenspun Media Group – vegasinc.com vegasdeluxe.com, lasvegassun.com and lasvegasweekly.com – were disrupted after being hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack.
The servers that hosted the websites were overwhelmed by the large number of packets going their way, causing the websites to experience outages for several hours, the Las Vegas Sun reports.
Currently, the sites are back online and Greenspun Media Group representatives have notified authorities.
News websites are usually taken down in such a manner when the attacker doesn’t like a particular article. Another situation in which DDOS attacks are launched against such services is when the competition wants to redirect customers their way.
Defending a company against attacks is not easy and, in some cases, some serious financial resources are needed. However, slowly but surely, protection mechanisms will become a necessity, especially for businesses that operate exclusively online.