14 DAY TRIAL // Several major news websites from the Czech Republic have been disrupted earlier this week after unknown hackers launched distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks against them. The list of targets includes IHNED.cz, iDNES.cz, Lidovky.cz, Novinky.cz and HNonline.sk.
Since Monday, when the attacks started, some of the news sites started publishing their stories on Facebook to keep their readers updated. Others directed users to alternative websites.
ihned.cz representatives have explained that this is not the first time when they’re the victims of a DDOS attack. However, so far they’ve only been targeted from abroad and it has been easy for them to mitigate the attack because they simply had to block the service for foreign users.
On this occasion, the cyberattacks appear to be launched from within the Czech Republic which makes it more difficult to mitigate them.
iDNES.cz revealed that the attacks against its systems started on Monday at 8:30 AM. As soon as the attacks started, the company’s IT teams went to work to mitigate the large number of packets that went their way.
“It's not the first time that idnes.cz faces such an attack,” iDNES.cz representatives wrote on Facebook. “It is the first time in the history of idnes.cz when the attack is successful.”
At the time of writing, the news websites appear to be working properly.
This series of DDOS attacks comes shortly after several media organizations from the United States reported being targeted by Chinese hackers in what they called a massive cyber espionage campaign.
However, in the cases of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, the hackers didn’t resort to distributed denial-of-service attacks. Instead, they planted pieces of malware on the organizations’ computers in an attempt to harvest information related to China.