Aporrea.org suffers a prolonged DDoS attack that leaves it inaccessible for several days (February 2017)
The Venezuelan news website Aporrea.org suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that began on February 16, 2017, and kept it totally or partially offline for about a week, until service was restored around February 22. According to the outlet itself, the attack generated a flood of traffic—up to 17 million network packets per second—from a wide variety of sources, which overwhelmed its network and prevented users from accessing the site. Administrators detected sources of the attack in Venezuela, the United States, Brazil, China, and a European country, and had to migrate to another server and hire a network protection service to get back online. The perpetrator was not identified; Aporrea attributed the attack to attempts to silence its critical editorial stance. Note: The mention of “17 million megabytes per second” is not supported by the sources, which refer to 17 million packets per second.
Impact details
Aporrea was inaccessible for nearly a week due to a prolonged DDoS attack. The response included relocation and a network protection service; no data breaches or content theft were reported.
Classification & severity
- Category
- Availability
- Subtype
- Distributed denial of service
- Confidence
- High
Aporrea and other corroborating reports describe a prolonged DDoS attack that rendered the site inaccessible for nearly a week.
Severity assessment
Medium- Functional impact
- Denial (non-critical)
- Information impact
- None
- Affected scope
- Single system
- Critical service
- None
- Public confidence
- Limited
- Recoverability
- Supplemented
A service outage lasting nearly a week caused by a DDoS attack against an alternative news portal, which required relocation and protection measures; there was no data exposure or impact on critical services.
Timeline
A DDoS attack against Aporrea.org begins, rendering the website inaccessible to users.
Aporrea issues a public statement explaining that it was offline due to a prolonged DDoS attack of up to 17 million packets per second and that it migrated to a new server; the incident is reported by media outlets and press organizations.
The portal is restored after migrating to another server/data center and contracting a network protection service.