AP News Website Suffers Major Outage, Suspected DoS Attack by Hacktivist Group Anonymous Sudan
The Associated Press (AP) website experienced a significant outage due to a possible denial-of-service attack. Hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility, but investigations are ongoing to determine the real culprits.
The Associated Press (AP) news website experienced a significant outage earlier this week, which has been identified as a possible denial-of-service (DoS) attack. The attack involved flooding the site with an excessive amount of data, overwhelming its capacity and effectively shutting it down. Starting on Tuesday afternoon, visitors to the apnews.com site were able to access the home page. However, they encountered difficulties when attempting to follow the links to individual news stories. Some pages appeared completely blank, while others displayed error messages.
"The Associated Press news website experienced an outage that appeared to be consistent with a denial-of-service attack, a federal criminal act that involves flooding a site with data in order to overwhelm it and knock it offline." https://t.co/0UL2Rf7sRB
— Jon Gambrell | جون (@jongambrellAP) November 1, 2023
Fortunately, the issue was resolved by Wednesday morning. Although the AP's delivery systems to customers and mobile apps remained unaffected during the outage, the company's media relations manager, Nicole Meir, revealed that they have been experiencing periodic surges in traffic. Engineers have been investigating the cause of these surges, but each time they seemed to have identified the source, it would resurface elsewhere. Simultaneously, a hacktivist group named Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for the attack on Western news outlets, including the AP.
On their Telegram channel, the group announced their intention to carry out these attacks and later presented screenshots as evidence of their success in rendering these news sites inaccessible through distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Cybersecurity analyst Alexander Leslie provided insights into the group's tactics, stating that they employ a simple propaganda mechanism. The attackers conduct a temporary attack, capture screenshots to document their alleged success, which typically only affects a small number of users for a short period of time, and then claim it as a massive triumph.
However, AP has not been able to verify whether Anonymous Sudan was indeed behind the attack. Investigations are ongoing to determine the real culprits and ascertain their motives for targeting the news organization. The incident serves as a reminder of the growing threats posed by cybercriminals and hacktivist groups who are capable of disrupting essential services and spreading misinformation.