The news website of the Associated Press (AP) has experienced a disruption, displaying characteristics consistent with a denial-of-service attack - a criminal act involving an overwhelming influx of data to render a site inaccessible.
A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is a malicious act where someone tries to make a website, online service, or network unavailable to its intended users. They do this by overwhelming the targeted system with a flood of traffic or data.
This flood of information is so much that the system can't keep up with it, and it ends up unable to respond to normal requests. The goal of a DoS attack can vary.
Some attackers might be trying to harm a business or organization for competitive or personal reasons. Others might be doing it to distract the victim from other cybercrimes they are committing.
BERLIN, GERMANY - JANUARY 25: In this photo illustration a young man types on an illuminated computer keyboard typically favored by computer coders on January 25, 2021 in Berlin, Germany. 2020 saw a sharp rise in global cybercrime that was in part driven by the jump in online retailing that ensued during national lockdowns as governments sought to rein in the coronavirus pandemic.
AP News Website Down
On Tuesday afternoon, attempts to access apnews.com led to the loading of the home page, but links to individual stories experienced various malfunctions. Some pages remained empty, while others exhibited error messages.
The issue was resolved by Wednesday morning, according to AP. However, it is important to note that AP's delivery systems to clients and mobile apps remained unaffected by the outage.
Nicole Meir, a media relations manager at AP, commented on the situation, saying that they experienced periodic surges in traffic, but they are still currently looking into the cause. She added that as engineers addressed surging traffic from one source, similar surges would emerge elsewhere.
Hacktivist Group Declares Intention to Attack
On Tuesday morning, a hacktivist group identifying as Anonymous Sudan declared on its Telegram channel its intention to launch attacks on Western news outlets.
Following this announcement, the group posted screenshots of the AP and other news sites, purportedly as evidence of successful DDoS attacks that made them inaccessible.
Cybersecurity analyst Alexander Leslie from the Recorded Future firm shed light on the tactic, describing it as a straightforward propaganda maneuver.
The actor reportedly initiates a brief attack, captures "proof" of a short-lived outage affecting a limited user base, and then amplifies it as a major accomplishment.
"The propaganda mechanism is rather simple. The actor conducts a temporary attack, screenshots 'proof' of an outage that often lasts for a short period of time and affects a small number of users, and then claims it to be a massive success," Leslie said in a statement with AFP.
However, AP has yet to verify and confirm whether Anonymous Sudan was behind the attack.
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