14 DAY TRIAL // Before the World Cup even started, hacktivists promised to take down several sites, including those of sponsors to the sporting event. Last night, one World Cup website went down and it hasn’t been restored just yet.
The www.worldcup2014.gov.br website was disrupted by hacktivists, effectively ruining the competition for some.
Incapsula, a company that deals with online security and provides protection to various domains, including against DDoS attacks, has been waiting for the attacks ever since the World Cup kicked off last week.
“The attacks on feedly and Evernote are important and troubling all on their own. However, that they were executed in the same week that Anonymous announced they were prepping a widescale attack on FIFA’s World Cup sponsors even more troubling,” Marc Gaffan, co-founder and chief business officer at Incapsula, told Softpedia.
He explains that often prior to large attacks, hackers will flex their muscles by attacking other targets, which guarantees that when the real strike comes, their resources are working at 100 percent.
“Further evidence of this is that some of the official government sites we work with have seen an escalation in DDoS activity in the last week. What we're seeing with Evernote and feedly might just be a prelude to the real show,” Gaffan said.
The fact that the attack was a success despite all the extra warning the organizers had is a surprise, but not a very big one. In fact, Incapsula’s Igal Zeifman, product evangelist, pointed out that the situation is a reminder as to why organizations should always re-evaluate their DDoS protection or risk facing the consequences, such as it happened now.
Nowadays it is easier than ever to perform high level DDoS attacks which makes the situation that much more important since it looks like Anonymous’ threats weren’t taken seriously at all.
Considering its past actions and attacks, the fact that the World Cup organizers seemingly ignored or did not prepare enough for the chance that the hacktivists really weren’t kidding is condemnable. While there is plenty of information about the matches outside of the World Cup website, including the very search results pages in Google, it’s still a shame that this website was taken down and hasn’t been restored after so many hours.
Anonymous originally placed a video of the protests against the World Cup on the site, although that has since disappeared leaving room to a completely blank page.