website outage or take down
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.
Actor desconocido