The website of the Nakypilo media group was down due to a DDoS attack early on 22 October. The site was receiving so many requests that it stopped functioning for about an hour as the protection services were struggling to fulfill their task. Nakypilo journalists reported this to Yulia Napolska, the Institute of Mass Information representative in Kharkiv oblast.
Nakypilo chief editor Olena Leptuha said in a comment to the IMI representative that the news outlet was covering the aftermath of today’s strike on a kindergarten by Russian troops when the cyber attack on the website occurred. The team is inclined to think that the attack was carried out by Russian hackers.
Leptuha says that the DDoS attack intended to “take down” the website by overloading it with requests: to deny access to it to both users and the administrators.
“And the enemy did somewhat succeed in this — the website was down for an hour. The amount of requests was such that even the built-in systems and services that we use could not cope as usual. The Cloudflare service did not cope, either,” adds Olena Leptuha.
However, the technicians quickly responded to the attack and the website is already up and running.
Earlier, MykVisti journalist received a message that appeared to be an invitation to a non-existent NATO–UAF event and contained a phishing link disguised as a registration form.