AP news site hit by apparent denial-of-service attack

The Associated Press news web site skilled an outage that gave the impression to be per a denial-of-service assault, a federal legal act that entails flooding a web site with information with a purpose to overwhelm it and knock it offline.

Attempting to go to the apnews.com web site at numerous factors from Tuesday afternoon would load the house web page, though hyperlinks to particular person tales failed in numerous methods. Some pages remained clean, whereas others displayed error messages. The drawback was resolved by Wednesday morning.

AP’s supply techniques to prospects and cell apps weren’t affected by the outage.

“We’ve experienced period surges in traffic but we’re still looking into the cause,” mentioned Nicole Meir, a media relations supervisor on the firm. When engineers thought they’d a deal with on surging visitors from one supply, she mentioned, it will resurface elsewhere.

A hacktivist group that calls itself Anonymous Sudan mentioned on its Telegram channel Tuesday morning that it will be launching assaults on Western news retailers. The group subsequently posted screenshots of the AP and different new websites as proof they’d been rendered unreachable by DDoS assaults.

“The propaganda mechanism is rather simple,” mentioned Alexander Leslie, an analyst with the cybersecurity agency Recorded Future. “The actor conducts a temporary attack, screenshots `proof’ of an outage that often lasts for a short period of time and affects a small number of users, and then claims it to be a massive success.”

AP has not been in a position to confirm whether or not Anonymous Sudan was behind the assault.