Kyrgyz news website KaktusMedia is currently inaccessible in Tajikistan. Kyrgyz news websites are reportedly experiencing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in connection with reports about Raiymbek Matraimov.
Due to a DDoS attack, some Kyrgyz news websites are currently functioning intermittently while others are inaccessible outside Kyrgyzstan.
Thus, KaktusMedia is functioning intermittently and is not accessible in the territory of Tajikistan.
“Unfortunately, we have technical problems, experiencing a DDoS attack. In order to protect and preserve the website at least in the territory of Kyrgyzstan, we have temporarily restricted access. But we are solving this problem and hope our website will be available again outside our country, including in Tajikistan,” representative of Kaktus-Media told Asia-Plus.
Kloop.kg on December 17 reported an unprecedented DDoS attack on Kyrgyz media outlets that reproduced Factcheck.kg report about the Matraimov family.
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic. DDoS attacks achieve effectiveness by utilizing multiple compromised computer systems as sources of attack traffic. Exploited machines can include computers and other networked resources such as IoT devices. From a high level, a DDoS attack is like a traffic jam clogging up with highway, preventing regular traffic from arriving at its desired destination.
A DDoS attack requires an attacker to gain control of a network of online machines in order to carry out an attack. Computers and other machines (such as IoT devices) are infected with malware, turning each one into a bot (or zombie). The attacker then has remote control over the group of bots, which is called a botnet.
Once a botnet has been established, the attacker is able to direct the machines by sending updated instructions to each bot via a method of remote control. When the IP address of a victim is targeted by the botnet, each bot will respond by sending requests to the target, potentially causing the targeted server or network to overflow capacity, resulting in a denial-of-service to normal traffic. Because each bot is a legitimate Internet device, separating the attack traffic from normal traffic can be difficult.
