Publisher Of Sahara Reporters Cries Out, ‘We’re Under Severe Attacks’

New York-based online news
portal SaharaReporters, has issued a
statement, saying its website has come
under sustained cyber attacks in the past
three days. The publisher, Mr. Omoyele Sowore, who
described the attack as a severe multi-
pronged one triggered by unnamed
attackers to bring down the dirt-digging
platform, said his company’s server
administrators were working tirelessly to restore the site to norlmacy. Read full statement below. Attack On SaharaReporters Website Dear Readers: During the period between Wed. Aug 14 and
Fri. Aug 16, 2013, SaharaReporters has been
under a severe denial of service attack. The
attackers have used a multi-pronged
approach to their attack. Using a botnet
comprising some thousands of servers across the globe, the attackers have
debilitated the site a number of times
throughout this period. Their initial attack
targeted a POST method attack to bypass
the caching servers that normally prevent
these types of attack. As soon as we were able to assuage the effects of that attack,
the attackers switched their strategy and
began bombarding the site in other ways.
After responding to this methodology and
getting the site functioning for the majority
of the day on Thursday, the attackers again changed their strategy. The third prong of the attack is called a SYN
Flood attack, and it works by overloading
the server with connection requests that
linger for long periods of time. This attack
has proven quite challenging to overcome,
and we are currently working very hard to block this particular attack method. The
SYN Flood began sometime early Friday
morning and continues as of 2pm EST
Friday afternoon. Our server administrators
continue to work tirelessly to get Sahara
Reporters back on line, and we hope to have your news back to you in short order. Since establishing Saharareporters.com in 2006, the website and operators have been
subjected to series of attacks both in the
cyber space, media platforms and through
proxy lawsuits, we have been declared
public enemies to the extent that one of
the columnists associated with Saharareporters has been serially detained
and harassed whenever he visits Nigeria.
While we cannot stop the powerful subjects
of our groundbreaking reports from
engaging in these cowardly attacks, we
assure the reading public, especially our fans that nothing will stop Saharareporters
and its affiliates from keeping up on the
well-traveled path of exposing the
characters responsible for the decimation
of the dignity of Africans.