United States-based publisher of Saharareporters.com, Omoyele Sowore, has revealed that the online news medium with a penchant for exposing corruption in Nigeria has recently been under severe attacks by unknown hackers.
Sowore disclosed in a statement late Friday that even in the midst of frustrations by the hackers, he had done everything possible to restore the website.
The publisher noted that the attack began between Wednesday 14 Aug and Friday 16 Aug, 2013 and that since then, the attackers have devised various means to counter his efforts to bring normalcy to the crisis.
The website had been restored when our correspondent visited it, but Sowore said there was more to be done to make it fully operational.
“SaharaReporters has been under a severe denial of service attack. The attackers have used a multi-pronged approach to their attack.
“Using a botnet comprising some thousands of servers across the globe, the attackers have debilitated the site a number of times throughout this period. Their initial attack targeted a POST method attack to bypass the caching servers that normally prevent these types of attack.
“As soon as we were able to assuage the effects of that attack, the attackers switched their strategy and began bombarding the site in other ways,” he disclosed.
He added that after responding to this methodology and getting the site functioning for the majority of the day on Thursday, the attackers again changed their strategy.
“The third prong of the attack is called a SYN Flood attack, and it works by overloading the server with connection requests that linger for long periods of time. This attack has proven quite challenging to overcome, and we are currently working very hard to block this particular attack method.
“The SYN Flood began sometime early Friday morning and continues as of 2pm EST Friday afternoon. Our server administrators continue to work tirelessly to get Sahara Reporters back on line, and we hope to have your news back to you in short order,” he promised.
The publisher said since establishing Saharareporters.com in 2006, the website and operators have been subjected to series of attacks both in the cyber space, media platforms and through proxy lawsuits, adding: “we have been declared public enemies to the extent that one of the columnists associated with Saharareporters has been serially detained and harassed whenever he visits Nigeria.
“While we cannot stop the powerful subjects of our groundbreaking reports from engaging in these cowardly attacks, we assure the reading public, especially our fans that nothing will stop Saharareporters and its affiliates from keeping up on the well-travelled path of exposing the characters responsible for the decimation of the dignity of Africans.”
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