An attack took down the website sebastianasinsecretos.com, run by Venezuelan journalist Sebastiana Barráez
According to Freedom House’s 2019 Freedom on the Net report, Venezuelan independent journalist Sebastiana Barráez created her own website, sebastianasinsecretos.com, to circumvent the blockade imposed in Venezuela against the news outlet Infobae. That site was targeted in two attacks during 2019. One of these attacks took the site offline after it republished an article about threats made by the armed group ELN against the May 1 march called for by Juan Guaidó—an article originally published on Infobae on April 25, 2019. Despite the attacks, the journalist continued to publish on other platforms.
Impact details
According to a report by Freedom House, the attacks took sebastianasinsecretos.com offline during 2019. The journalist continued to publish via other platforms; no data breaches were reported.
Classification & severity
- Category
- Availability
- Subtype
- website outage or take down
- Confidence
- High
Freedom House reports on the attacks that took Sebastiana Barreaz’s website offline; the specific technical method has not been made public.
Severity assessment
Low- 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
Sebastiana Barráez publishes/reposts the article “The ELN terrorist group threatened the May 1 march called for by Juan Guaidó in Venezuela” (originally published in Infobae).
Following the publication, his website sebastianasinsecretos.com was attacked and taken offline; the site was attacked twice in 2019.
Freedom House documents the incident in the report *Freedom on the Net 2019* (Section B4, footnote 5).