Armando.info
Communications · Private armando.info
- Incidents
- 2
- High impact
- 0
- First seen
- Aug 1, 2018
- Latest seen
- Mar 2, 2019
Linked incidents
Massive DDoS Attack Takes the Investigative Journalism Website Armando.info Offline (March 2019)
The Venezuelan investigative journalism website Armando.info suffered a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that rendered it virtually inaccessible. On March 3, 2019, co-founder and co-editor Ewald Scharfenberg reported via Twitter that, since March 2, the site had been under a “massive cyberattack” that prevented it from staying online, forcing the outlet to publish its content through Facebook and partner outlets such as La Patilla. According to IPYS Venezuela’s annual digital rights report (reproduced by El Nacional), attacks on the Armando.info server had been recorded since February 2019; the most intense episode occurred on March 2, beginning at 9 p.m. on Saturday and lasting all night until Sunday morning, directed primarily from Russia and reaching up to 9 million requests to the server in a single hour. The attack is part of a coordinated offensive against independent Venezuelan media outlets: on March 4, the websites Efecto Cocuyo, El Pitazo, and El Cooperante were also taken offline by attacks on their servers (confirmed by IPYS Venezuela, Venezuela Sin Filtro, and NetBlocks), alongside blocks of Twitter and SoundCloud by CANTV. Armando.info had been a recurring target of cyberattacks after exposing corruption in the state-run CLAP food program and conducting other investigations.
Armando.info and El Pitazo Face Selective ISP Blocking in Venezuela (August 2018)
During August 2018, Armando.info and El Pitazo were subject to selective blocking by Venezuelan internet service providers. El Pitazo reported a new block starting on the night of August 1; OONI/IPYS documented DNS and HTTP manipulation targeting its domains on CANTV, Digitel, Movistar, and Movilnet, resulting in an approximate 50% drop in traffic. For Armando.info, OONI tests on August 13 showed intermittent HTTP failures, particularly on CANTV; OONI noted that the block was neither uniform nor conclusive as sole evidence of intent, although server issues were unlikely due to the use of Google Shield. The DDoS attacks against both media outlets remain a separate historical context: there is no public evidence of a single actor, botnet, or DDoS infrastructure involved in this episode.