Kherson's MOST under intense cyber attack

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The Kherson online news outlet MOST has suffered an intense DDoS attack today (October 31) in the afternoon, chief editor Serhiy Nikitenko reports to the Institute of Mass Information.

"The attack began around 2:00 p.m. As we can see, it is very intense, and our defenses are not quite able to repel it yet, which caused the website to temporarily go down," he said.

The editors associate this attack with a series of publications about the construction of underground schools in the city.

"We have been following this topic almost since the day this scandalous construction began; first it caused an attack on our colleague Olena Hnitetska, and then a representative of the contractor asked her to pass me some strange 'regards', which we clearly view as pressure on the independent media," he added.

According to the chief editor, on October 30, the media outlet published an exclusive comment by the chair of the Kherson OMA, Oleksandr Prokudin, who said that they had decided against building some of the planned schools following the backlash from the people.

"According to my information, this news was very poorly received by the associates of Roman Mrochka, the city's military administration chair, and I fully assume that this is revenge for our stance," Nikitenko says.

On September 30, Olena Hnitetska, a journalist with the online news outlet MOST, was attacked by an unknown man on a school's premises in Kherson. The man shoved her and took away her phone, tossing into a pit where construction equipment was working. The journalist was working on a report about the construction of underground schools in Kherson.

The Kherson police has opened a case under Part 1 of Article 171 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (Preclusion of the legal professional work of journalists) over the attack.