Respected and widely feared news portal, SaharaReporters, has stated that its website has been attacked by cyberspace fraudsters in the past three days.
Publisher of the online portal, Omoyele Sowore, in a statement described the attack as a severe multi-pronged one triggered by unnamed attackers to bring down the the news platform.
He said his team of engineers were working towards ensuring that the site returns to its usual active status, while also appealing to readers to be patient with its management as nothing would deter them from reporting objectively and professionally about the state of affairs in the African region.
The statement reads in full:
Attack On SaharaReporters Website
Dear Readers:
During the period between Wed. Aug 14 and Fri. Aug 16, 2013, 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. 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.
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, 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-traveled path of exposing the characters responsible for the decimation of the dignity of Africans.
Omoyele Sowore
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