Journalists Silenced in Mexico
Weekly Mexican News publication Riodoce, based in Culiacan in Sinaloa State, is reporting that their web site has been taken down by a denial of service attack. Riodoce received an email from their hosting provider, Dreamhost, saying that the Riodoce site had been taken down from the web due to a distributed denial of service attack. Dreamhost apparently called it a large attack that was threatening the sites of other customers.
On November 22 one of Riodoce's founders was awarded the Committee to Protect Journalists 2011 International Press Freedom Award. The publication's executives believe the attack is a result of their reporting on the activities of the drug cartel in their area. Many press outlets have been shut down as a result of the drug violence, and some have self-censored in the face of threats and violence, such as 35 bodies being dumped on a main highway during rush hour. In some cases, citizens have turned to Twitter in order to stay informed of attacks or threatened violence in their area. In 2009, Riodoce had a grenade thrown through their office window.
A distributed denial of service (ddos) attack is essentially a large volume of requests targeted at a single web server with the intent of overwhelming that server and making it impossible for non-hostile traffic to gain access to the site. Typically a ddos attack occurs when a hostile actor hires a botnet - a large network of computers that have been infected by malware and viruses that are waiting for their "master" to tell them what to do. This botnet is then told to target a particular web server, and thousands of requests for web pages are continually sent to that server. A ddos is very difficult to defend against.
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