Attack Takes the Punto de Corte Website Offline After It Published an Interview with Luisa Ortega Díaz (July 2018)
On July 11, 2018, shortly after publishing an interview by journalist Sebastiana Barráez with former Attorney General Luisa Ortega Díaz, the Venezuelan news website Punto de Corte, led by political scientist Nicmer Evans, suffered an attack that crashed its platform and took it offline, preventing readers from accessing it. According to a technical analysis conducted by the NGO Espacio Público, the attack involved unauthorized access from several servers operating in parallel, with the apparent aim of mass file encryption, which forced the website to migrate to a new server. Evans noted that in the earlier months of 2018, there had already been attempts to sabotage the site (February 22, April 26, and June 2). Press freedom organizations framed the incident as part of a pattern of censorship and blocking of digital media in Venezuela. The perpetrator of the attack was not publicly identified.
Impact details
0 Exposed records
Punto de Corte went offline after publishing an interview with Luisa Ortega Díaz. Espacio Público reported unauthorized access to parallel servers and an apparent attempt at mass file encryption; no data breach was reported.
Classification & severity
- Category
- Availability
- Subtype
- website outage or take down
- Confidence
- High
Public reports document an attack that took Punto de Corte offline following the interview with Luisa Ortega Díaz; Espacio Público reported unauthorized access and an attempt to encrypt a large number of files.
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
Punto de Corte publishes Sebastiana Barráez’s interview with former Attorney General Luisa Ortega Díaz, in which she states that Hugo Chávez died on December 28, 2012, and not on March 5, 2013.
That same night, the website began experiencing problems due to a coordinated attack from several servers (unauthorized access), which took it offline.
Nicmer Evans and the NGO Espacio Público publicly denounce the attack; media outlets such as Efecto Cocuyo, El Nacional, and TalCual report on it.
The portal is forced to migrate to a new server in order to continue operating in the face of the massive attack.