RNW sites inaccessible due to cyber attack

Hello from Hilversum, What an eventful week it has been! As you may have already seen, our web domain was the target of a major DDoS attack, which resulted in all our websites and blogs being unavailable from 2000 UTC on 3 May to around 1330 UTC on 4 May. Fortunately we were able to communicate normally via Facebook and Twitter. In fact our audio streams were not affected, as they are hosted at a different domain. If you make use of our online audio, I suggest you bookmark the URL so that you can continue to listen even if the rnw.nl domain is unavailable. I don't know if the DDos attacks have ended, but I suspect not because I cannot access our Intranet site today via the usual VPN link. Today is the Liberation Day holiday for many people in the Netherlands so I'm working from home. However, our public websites and blogs are functioning normally.  The full story is below.

RNW sites inaccessible due to cyber attack From around 2000 UTC on Tuesday 3 May until around 1330 UTC on Wednesday 4 May, all sites of Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW) were unreachable due to a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. RNW Director-General Jan Hoek said: "A cyber attack demonstrates the vulnerability of new media. Fortunately, as an international organization for which free speech is very important, we still reach the bulk of our worldwide audience with independent information through our 3,000 media partners worldwide." The cyber attack was launched on the domain rnw.nl which covers all ten language sites of RNW. Traffic was automatically redirected to the mobile site of RNW. But on Wednesday morning it too was inaccessible due to the intensity of the attack. The cyber attack was still ongoing when services were resumed, but due to some technical measures our websites and this Weblog are back in normal operation. In a DDoS attack a website is bombarded with large amounts of data, causing it to crash. It is still unknown who launched this attack. As Jan Hoek pointed out, this was a stark reminder of the vulnerability of new media. See also our Weblog item from Monday 2 May about Dutch domestic radio stations being affected by a satellite failure.   Coincidentally, last Friday our management issued a statement affecting our shortwave facility in Madagascar: Via Media Network -Andy Sennit

 

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