El Diario (elDiario.com) Suffers DDoS Attack That Left Its Website Offline for Three Hours
On July 26, 2020, the independent Venezuelan news portal El Diario (elDiario.com) suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that rendered its website inaccessible for approximately three hours. According to the outlet’s own report, in less than an hour it received more than 18 million requests to access its homepage, with a single IP address sending half a million requests, originating primarily from Russia, China, and Nigeria. The outlet framed the incident as part of a pattern of DDoS attacks used as a mechanism of censorship against the independent press in Venezuela.
Impact details
El Diario reported more than 18 million requests in less than an hour and about three hours of downtime on July 26, 2020. No data breach was reported.
Classification & severity
- Category
- Availability
- Subtype
- Distributed denial of service
- Confidence
- High
Public disclosure documents indicate that the DDoS traffic prevents readers from accessing the site normally, although no data has been compromised.
Severity assessment
Medium- Functional impact
- Denial (non-critical)
- Information impact
- None
- Affected scope
- Organization-wide
- Critical service
- None
- Public confidence
- Limited
- Recoverability
- Regular
Impact on availability/censorship versus media. No public evidence of data compromise or critical service interruption.
Timeline
The server hosting elDiario.com was hit by a DDoS attack involving more than 18 million access requests in less than an hour (half a million from a single IP address), originating from Russia, China, and Nigeria; the website was offline for about three hours.
El Diario publishes a report detailing the attack and frames it as a form of censorship against Venezuela’s independent media.