Ongoing cyber-attacks on Sudanese newspaper

The website of the independent electronic newspaper El Tareeg has been subjected to ongoing cyber-attacks disabling its functions from mid-March.

The newspaper said in a statement on Sunday that attacks on the site reached a climax on Thursday and Friday until Saturday morning. Saboteurs managed to disable some functions of the website before a technical team managed to resolve them and repair the malfunctions caused by the attack.

El Tareeg said the perpetrators used distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Assailants use a bot that infects many vulnerable computer systems and instructs them to bombard a website with online traffic. This overloads the servers and causes a denial of service for regular users of the targeted system, making the website unreachable.

According to a US-based NGO, independent online news outlets are frequently subject to hacking attacks by what activists believe is the work of the Cyber Jihadist Unit. In its ‘Freedom of the Net 2015’ report, Freedom House said that several cyberattacks against critical news websites and activists’ social media accounts escalated around the April 2015 general elections.

Read the 'Freedom of the Net 2015 report' of Freedom House here