The Augusta Free Press website has been hit twice on Christmas Eve by distributed denial of service attacks that has taken the site offline for a combined 10 hours.
The incidents are under investigation, said AFP editor Chris Graham.
DDoS attacks typically hit high-profile targets like banks, credit-card companies, government agencies and national and international news sources.
The goal of perpetrators is to simply take a site offline. DDoS attacks do not involve efforts to obtain or extract sensitive data like account information or money.
The AFP news website is a free-access site that doesn’t require subscriptions, and there is no user information to access on the back end.
“We’re told that this is an unusual event for a small-town news website,” Graham said.
AFP has not received any notices of threats related to any news coverage, and there doesn’t appear to be anyone making such threats or taking responsibility for the attacks on social media.
“Whoever is behind these attacks is likely to just get bored and move on,” Graham said. “There have to be bigger fish to fry than Augusta Free Press.”
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