Online newspaper Sudanile back online after ‘serious hack’

Online Sudanese newspaper Sudanile is back online after a week-long blackout, following “a fierce campaign and repeated hacking attempts”, the paper reported on Wednesday. The latest hack attempt, that targeted the newspaper’s digital archives going back 24 years, was largely thwarted, however the site’s content from the last three months has been lost, the paper’s editor says.

In a statement on the site on Wednesday, Sudanile Editor-in-Chief Tarek Al-Jazouli says that it foiled a serious hacking operation last Thursday, that led to a week-long suspension of its website.

“Sudanile newspaper has been exposed to a fierce campaign and repeated hacking attempts, especially after the outbreak of the war,” he says, citing four attempts, “the most dangerous of which was the serious hacking on Thursday, October 17, which resulted in the site being down for a whole week.”

Al-Jazouli says that while initially, the content of the site dating back 25 years was deleted, however they have managed to recover the bulk of the archive, except for the content from the past three months.

Al-Jazouli says that the news site will release information later regarding the parties behind the hacks, “after we obtained all the details from the company that hosts the site, which is now working on cleaning and securing the site”.

Journalism under threat

Rashid Saeed, Radio Dabanga’s Team Leader, Verification and News Gathering, emphasised on Monday at the Free Press Live 2024 event at in The Hague, the Netherlands: “Since the outbreak of the current conflict between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023, 90 per cent of the infrastructure of media institutions has been destroyed, journalists have been killed, targeted, detained, tortured, or forced to flee abroad.”

As reported by Radio Dabanga today, international journalism and press freedom advocacy group Reporters Without Borders has appealed to the authorities in Egypt halt the imminent deportation of four Sudanese journalists who were arrested in September, and are being held in a refugee centre in Aswan, on the border between Egypt and Sudan. The group calls on Egypt to release them, and guarantee their protection.