Zaporizhzhia website іnform.zp.ua has been under a DDoS attack for a month. Team blames Russia

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The Zaporizhzhia website Inform.zp.ua has been the target of large-scale DDoS attacks since mid-October. The team believes the attack is related to their reporting on the Russian army's crimes in the temporarily occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia oblast, chief editor Eric Brynza reports to the Institute of Mass Information representative in Zaporizhzhia oblast, Natalia Vyhovska.

According to him, the attack began on October 12. In the first weeks of the attack, the website's server was overloaded by numerous requests, many of which were incorrect or made no sense. The requests were coming from different IP addresses and were about sections or tags that the website did not have. Most of the requests concerned the English language version of the website, which does not exist, either.

“They attacked us in cycles. Sometimes the server would be overloaded with requests, then it would be alright again. Finally, our server crashed. It is unclear where they are attacking from. The website is being targeted from different IP addresses, with different requests, so we can't say exactly where the attack is coming from," Brynza said.

Due to the server reboot, the website was unavailable for some time. The team had to spend over two weeks restoring the databases and rewriting the code to step up protection.

“We have now installed additional safeguards and restored to the old version of the site. Not everything is working as it should yet, because the news get displayed incorrectly in different language versions of the site. But we are doing everything necessary to fix it. There are no abnormal posts now. So the website is working,” said Eric Brynza.

The chief editor believes that the cyberattack is an act of pressure on freedom of speech and an attempt to interrupt the work of Zaporizhzhia oblast's prominent news resource. “This may be related to our reporting on the Russian army's crimes in the temporarily occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia oblast. Previously, the team received overt threats from Russian law enforcement agencies with warnings about possible hacker attacks,” said the chief editor.

As the IMI reported, throughout the first six months of the war, the team received numerous threats from Russian email addresses demanding that it stop reporting on the developments in the full-scale war and side with the Russian aggressors. The staff were threatened with torture, imprisonment, and deportation “to Siberia.” The office also received threats from Russian hackers saying they would “bring down the website” if the team “did not stop the pipeline of fakes about Russia.”