DDoS and Ransomware attacks demanding bitcoin ransom are not new to the online community. There have been innumerable instances of such attacks on websites belonging to various organizations, both government and private. The cybercriminals have so far been targeting the websites of banks, governments, financial institutions, private corporations, companies, emails service providers and in rare cases, personal webpages. But not anymore, as they have now started launching DDoS attacks on news websites as well.
The number of attacks on cryptocurrency based news portals have increased in the recent days. In the past one month alone, almost all leading cryptocurrency news sites have come under multiple attacks. The last among such DDoS attack was faced by CryptoCoinsNews and Hacked. The website was rendered inaccessible for a few hours and the publication has reported that the perpetrators demanded 2 BTC ransom to return the website to normalcy. Both the sites were later recovered by the publication’s tech team.
Coindesk, another leading cryptocurrency news site was allegedly targeted by hackers as well. While the publication has not made any clear statements regarding the outage, few claim that it was indeed targeted by attackers. CoinTelegraph was also under attack, with the site offline for a couple of hours.
NewsBTC is another site which has also faced multiple attacks by cybercriminals. Once, a hacker team called Alpha Team tried hacking into the website. They had claimed 1 BTC ransom within a period of week. NewsBTC was quick at thwarting the attack. The publication has stated on Monday that the website was again the target of a layer 7 DDoS attack which was detected early on and steps were taken to prevent any further damage.
Increasing attacks on news publications has now made it very important for companies to have a secure back up of their service so that in case of loss of any data, it can be easily recovered.