Cyberattack (DDoS) against the Vendata website, the open data platform of IPYS and Transparencia Venezuela
On May 8, 2018, the website of the civil society organization Vendata (vendata.org)—an open data platform created by the Venezuelan Institute for Press and Society (IPYS) and Transparencia Venezuela, the Venezuelan chapter of Transparency International—was the target of a cyberattack. According to error logs, the attack originated from multiple compromised computers that affected vendata.org and the Blue Host server where the data was hosted. Espacio Público and IPYS described it as a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which involves sending thousands of simultaneous connection requests to the same IP address to crash the website, forcing administrators to block and shut down the server. Those responsible were not identified. The incident occurred amid government smear campaigns against Transparencia Venezuela, which the Presidency has labeled a “subversive organization” funded by the U.S.
Impact details
Vendata crashed due to DDoS traffic, and the server was blocked or shut down by administrators or the hosting provider. No data theft or data breach has been reported.
Classification & severity
- Category
- Availability
- Subtype
- Distributed denial of service
- Confidence
- High
Front Line Defenders and Espacio Público documented a DDoS attack against Vendata that caused the website and server to go down.
Severity assessment
Medium- Functional impact
- Denial (non-critical)
- Information impact
- None
- Affected scope
- Organization-wide
- Critical service
- None
- Public confidence
- Limited
- Recoverability
- Regular
Incident involving media/civil society website availability or content integrity; no confirmed data exposure or critical service interruption.
Timeline
The vendata.org website and its server on Blue Host were attacked by multiple compromised computers (DDoS), causing the site to crash.
Administrators locked down and shut down the server to contain the attack, taking the platform offline.
Front Line Defenders published a report documenting the attack; Espacio Público, IPYS, and Transparencia Venezuela also reported on it.