“We have reason to believe that the Duterte administration has orchestrated this cyber attack on websites of critical and independent media as part of its efforts to silence criticism and dissent against it,” said Ronalyn Olea, managing editor of Bulatlat.
Since December, Bulatlat and several alternative media outfits have been experiencing a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, where the server of a website is maliciously being overloaded to shut it down.
Illustration by DEE AYROSO
By DEE AYROSO
Since the arrest and eventual posting of bail of news site Rappler’s chief Maria Ressa, Malacanang’s spin doctors have been attempting to absolve the president from allegations of curtailing press freedom and grave abuse of power. Still, the political backlash that the Duterte administration is getting has been unforgiving, and rightly so. Even the simplest…
What is Bulatlat? Bulatlat is an online news magazine established after the ouster of former President Joseph Estrada. Press freedom advocates and human rights defenders gathered to form the news agency to tap the then booming internet in the country to help explain issues and government policies and to contribute towards shaping public opinion by…
The attackers, the group said, have attacked their “front-end at Cloudfare and later on they directed the attack to the hosting site,” using at least 1,100 compromised computers “to flood the website with requests.”