14 DAY TRIAL // Servers belonging to the Project on Crowdsourced Imagery Analysis (PCIA), hosting data about nuclear tests, have been the subject of DDoS attacks just two days before North Korea's most recent nuclear tests.
The attack, which took place on Wednesday, forced PCIA to take down its "geoserver," a database hosting satellite imagery from various nuclear test bases and nuclear facilities from around the globe.
PCIA officials didn't formally accuse any nation, but the attack's timing is suspicious.
PCIA, a nonprofit run at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, buys these images from telecommunications companies and uses volunteers to scan for changes in local architecture and landscape. The results are indexed in its geoserver.
On Friday, North Korea carried out a nuclear test, detonating a 10 kiloton warhead near Punggye-ri, in the country's northeast, which caused a 5.3 Richter scale earthquake.
Punggye-ri is a region that is indexed by the PCIA project, along with other sensitive nuclear sites belonging to Russia, Iran, Myanmar, and more.
North Korea is not the only obvious perpetrator. Ten days earlier, PCIA added imagery from Russia's Novaya Zemlya nuclear test site. At the time of writing, the PCIA website is functional, but satellite imagery is not loading on any of the pages.
A PCIA official was adamant when talking to Wired that an external attack disrupted the project's servers and not an internal technical issue.
Unfortunately we were subject to a DoS attack this week and we took our geoserver down. We have not lost any data, just being vigilant. — Geo4Nonpro (@geo4nonpro) September 10, 2016