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The English-language website of CamboJA News was hit Sunday by a cyberattack that flooded it with automated traffic. It was the second attack this year, adding to concerns about online threats to independent journalism.
The attack, known as a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack, sent an unusually large volume of fake traffic at the site from a network of hijacked computers, known as a botnet. The aim was to overwhelm the website and keep readers from reaching its reporting, according to CamboJA’s technology team.
DDoS attackers take control of a large number of computers or other internet-connected devices, often without their owners knowledge, and use them to overwhelm servers which can cause a website to slow down or crash. Independent media outlets and rights groups are frequent targets.
The attack began at about 8:45 a.m. Sunday, when a surge of automated traffic hit the site’s homepage. At its peak, the site received about 1,000 requests per second. Each request is the equivalent of someone trying to load the page. The technology team recorded about 12,520 “malicious requests” in total.
It is not known who was behind the attack. A preliminary analysis found the traffic was routed through many internet addresses linked to cloud-hosting companies, including Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and Contabo, as well as Chinese internet service providers.
Despite the attack, the CamboJA News website remained online. But the web security service the site uses warned that the malicious traffic could continue. That could slow the site or require readers to pass extra checks, such as confirming they are human, before they can read stories.
It is the second DDoS attack on CamboJA News since the outlet launched in 2019, according to the technology team. The first, which CamboJA News did not previously disclose, came Jan. 23, when a similar surge of traffic peaked at about 670 requests per second.
The attack comes amid broader concerns over cyberattacks targeting independent media organizations and groups that track threats to press freedom.
On Jan. 12, the website of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an international investigative journalism network, was hit by a large-scale DDoS attack.
In June, Indonesian news outlet Tempo reported facing millions of cyberattacks after its reporting on online gambling. Earlier this month, a DDoS attack temporarily knocked offline Mapping Media Freedom, a platform that documents threats to journalists across Europe.
Sreng Saren, program manager at Digital Future Cambodia, said he suspected the attack on the CamboJA News site was meant to intimidate independent journalists and cut readers off from credible news, and that someone was likely directing it behind the scenes.
He said he had not previously heard of DDoS attacks against newsrooms in Cambodia. Independent outlets in the country have, however, faced other coordinated online attacks, including trolling campaigns and automated bot comments.