The El Cambur news portal went offline due to repeated attacks on its servers
Between January 30 and February 3, 2017, the Venezuelan online news portal El Cambur suffered repeated and massive attacks on its main servers, which took its website offline for about two days. According to its administrator, Rodolfo Rico, who spoke with IPYS Venezuela, this was the third time the site had been attacked in this manner, and on this occasion, the attack damaged the proxy system that generated the images linked to posts on its official Twitter account for several weeks. IPYS Venezuela recorded it as one of five cyberattacks in 2017 that limited access to or compromised the security of web platforms in Venezuela, as part of a wave of attacks against critical media outlets attributed by press organizations to alleged pro-government actors. The administrator was unable to determine the origin of the attacking IP addresses, as they were masked using a VPN.
Impact details
El Cambur suffered repeated attacks on its servers that took the website offline and damaged the image proxy used by its official Twitter account. No data breaches have been reported.
Classification & severity
- Category
- Availability
- Subtype
- Distributed denial of service
- Confidence
- High
IPYS reports repeated attacks against El Cambur's servers that took the website offline and affected its Twitter image proxy.
Severity assessment
Medium- Functional impact
- Denial (non-critical)
- Information impact
- None
- Affected scope
- Single system
- Critical service
- None
- Public confidence
- Limited
- Recoverability
- Regular
Repeated attacks took the El Cambur news portal offline and affected its Twitter image proxy; there was no data exposure or impact on critical services.
Timeline
Repeated attacks began against El Cambur’s main servers, taking the site offline.
The website is back online after being down for about two days; the image proxy system remains down for several weeks.
IPYS Venezuela issues an alert documenting the attack, with statements from administrator Rodolfo Rico.