Cyberattacks against the website of the human rights NGO COFAVIC (December 2016 and March 2017)
On March 20, 2017, the website of the Venezuelan human rights organization COFAVIC (Committee of Relatives of Victims of the Events of February–March 1989) was compromised, preventing its staff from accessing and managing the platform for approximately four hours, until access was restored with the help of cybersecurity experts. The attack coincided with COFAVIC’s participation in the 161st session of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and was part of a wave of attacks against Venezuelan NGO and media websites between March 7 and 20, 2017. A similar incident had previously affected COFAVIC’s website on December 20, 2016, allegedly in retaliation for a December 9 report on murders in the states of Sucre and Miranda. Front Line Defenders and PROVEA linked the attacks to the organization’s human rights advocacy work. The perpetrator was not publicly identified.
Impact details
The COFAVIC website was inaccessible to staff for about four hours on March 20, 2017; in addition, a previous outage had been reported in December 2016. No data breach was reported.
Classification & severity
- Category
- Availability
- Subtype
- website outage or take down
- Confidence
- High
Front Line Defenders and PROVEA document the unavailability of the COFAVIC website during attacks in December 2016 and March 2017.
Severity assessment
Low- Functional impact
- Minimal
- Information impact
- None
- Affected scope
- Organization-wide
- Critical service
- None
- Public confidence
- Limited
- Recoverability
- Regular
Website availability incident targeting an NGO or media organization; no data exposure or critical service disruption.
Timeline
First cyberattack against the COFAVIC website, allegedly in retaliation for a December 9, 2016, report on murders in the states of Sucre and Miranda; the site was temporarily taken offline.
Second cyberattack against the COFAVIC website: staff were unable to access or manage the platform for about four hours. This coincided with the NGO’s participation in the 161st session of the IACHR (March 17–22, 2017).
COFAVIC regained access to its website after about four hours with the help of cybersecurity experts.
Front Line Defenders published a case report documenting both attacks and expressing concern about the cyberattacks against COFAVIC and other human rights organizations in Venezuela.