El Pitazo suffers a DDoS attack and is inaccessible for about 17 hours
On March 9, 2017, El Pitazo suffered a DDoS attack following an initial phase of deindexing or preventive blocking, and its website was inaccessible for approximately 17 hours. Sources describe it as one of the clearest cases of a DDoS attack amid the wave of attacks against Venezuelan media outlets and organizations.
Overview
Missing evidence
Impact details
El Pitazo was offline for about 17 hours due to a two-phase attack that included a DDoS attack; the newsroom continued its coverage via social media.
Classification & severity
- Category
- Availability
- Subtype
- Distributed denial of service
- Confidence
- High
Sources from LatAm Journalism Review and El Pitazo describe a two-phase attack that included a powerful DDoS attack that kept the publication offline for 17 hours.
Severity assessment
Medium- Functional impact
- Denial (non-critical)
- Information impact
- None
- Affected scope
- Single system
- Critical service
- None
- Public confidence
- Limited
- Recoverability
- Regular
A 17-hour outage related to a DDoS attack on an independent news website; it was reported that coverage continued via social media and that no data breach occurred.
Timeline
El Pitazo suffers a DDoS attack and is inaccessible for about 17 hours