from hitting the SJS website with millions of requests on August 18 and 19. The largest portion of the traffic came via RayoByte and its hosting partners, the analysis said. The second half of the traffic came through several other online channels, including“We were very effective at mitigating the attack because within a few hours we realized we had seen this type of traffic before,” Qurium’s technical director Tord Lundström told CPJ.
Similar DDoS attacks began almost immediately after Kosovo-based news site Nacionale began publishing in March 2022, covering local politics and social issues, co-founder Visar Arifaj told CPJ in a recent phone interview. “Our website would be down quite often. Because we were still fresh in the news market, it really had an impact for us to reach our audiences,” Arifaj said. “For us to be down a couple of hours during the day was a huge blow.
In emails from March, Qurium informed Sprious of attacks lasting “several hours non-stop.” One of the attacks “sourced” millions of web requests from IP addresses “publicly advertised by Rayobyte/BlazingSEO,” Qurium said. Sprious responded that it had “blacklisted” access to Nacionale’s website and it had barred the “user” responsible – which Sprious did not name — from accessing its services, but in April Qurium again tracked a DDoS attack against Nacionale involving RayoByte.
However, RayoByte-sourced internet traffic to Nacionale’s website did not stop and featured in DDoS attacks against the outlet in July and August, Lundström told CPJ. While Kosovo policeone man in connection with the cyberattacks and Qurium has successfully prevented the continued attacks from taking Nacionale offline, Lundström told CPJ that incoming traffic shows attackers continuing to harness IPs from a combination of proxy services, VPNs, and other sources.
Alongside the cyberattacks, Nacionale’s staff have been subjected to “constant” online harassment for their work and were recentlyon the job, though those attackers have been arrested, Arifaj told CPJ. “This constant pressure, even when it doesn’t get to the journalists physically and in a direct manner, you can see that it does a lot for their burnout,” he added. “It does take a toll, mentally, on everyone.
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