Notes

Wikipedia Offline

Wikipedia reported extended outages this week in what many believe to be a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on one of the largest online information resources.



The German arm of Wikimedia, a non-profit organization that manages the Wikipedia website, tweeted on Friday (September 6) that servers belonging to the Wikimedia Foundation had been "paralyzed by an extremely large and extensive DDoS attack."



It added that Wikipedia and its sister projects were temporarily not available.



Wikimedia Germany's homepage was accessible despite the attack because its pages are hosted on separate servers than the main content on its website.



According to NetBlocks the same incident affected online encyclopedia users from the United States, France, Poland and Germany. It impacted certain Wikipedia servers at around 18:00 UTC on the Friday.



NetBlocks reports that Wikipedia was online again on Saturday, at 02:40 UTC, just nine hours after it was offline.



In an official statement released on Saturday the Wikimedia Foundation said that it continued to be plagued by problems related to the alleged attack.



"Today, Wikipedia was hit with a malicious attack that has shut it down in various countries for a few days," it said.



"The attack is ongoing and our Site Reliability Engineering team is striving to stop it and restore access to the site."





WoW has knocked the web off

Other social platforms, including World of Warcraft (WoW) and Twitch were also affected by denial of service attacks going into the early hours of Saturday morning.



"[TheThe World of Warcraft service has been negatively impacted by an ongoing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack," Blizzard, the WoW game's developer, said in a statement on Saturday.



"For many hours, we've seen WoW realms repeatedly targeted by attackers and taken offline by them."



Blizzard stated that WoW experienced outages in the US and Europe.



The Daily Swig reached out to Wikimedia Foundation and they confirmed that their website was the victim of an DDoS attack.



A DDoS attack occurs when a system is inundated with bogus internet traffic in order to take reliant services or networks offline.



Mitigation is usually done by filtering or spreading content over multiple, distributed servers.



On Saturday, an previously unknown group called UKDrillas took to Twitter to claim responsibility for the attack on Wikipedia servers.



The account was suspended and stated that it was responsible for hacking internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Chicago, and other cities. Mccainsource.com These hubs of routing are used to support Twitch and Blizzard Gaming.



The Daily Swig asked both exchanges to confirm if they had experienced any problems due to the outages. AMS-IX, Amsterdam's routing hub confirmed that there were no issues with its platform.


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