Notes

Wikipedia Offline

Wikipedia reported extended outages this week in what many believe could be a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on one of the world's largest online information sources.



Wikimedia Germany, the non-profit behind Wikipedia posted on Twitter Friday, September 6, that servers belonging the Wikimedia Foundation were "paralyzed" by a large and extensive DDoS attack.



"Wikipedia and its sister projects are currently unavailable," it added.



Wikimedia Germany homepage remained accessible despite the attack, as its pages are located on separate servers from the main content on its site.



Online encyclopedia users from the UK, France, Poland, Germany, Italy, and the United States were reported to be affected by the same incident which hit certain Wikipedia servers at approximately 18:00 UTC on the Friday, NetBlocks reports.



NetBlocks reports that Wikipedia was online again on Saturday at 02:40 UTC, nine hours following the time it went offline.



In a statement the Wikimedia Foundation said that it is still facing problems related to the alleged attack, as stated in an announcement on Saturday.



It said that Wikipedia was attacked by a malicious attack, and had been taken offline in several countries for intermittent periods.



"The attack continues, and our Site Reliability Engineering group is determined to stop it.





WoW has knocked the web off

Other social networks, including World of Warcraft (WoW) and Twitch, were also impacted by attacks to stop service 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 developer, said in an announcement on Saturday.



"For some time today we've witnessed WoW realms taken offline and targeted by the attacker(s)."



Blizzard said that WoW had issues with outages in the US and Europe.



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



DDoS attacks are when the internet is overwhelmed with fake traffic, causing it to take services or networks offline.
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Mitigation typically involves filtering or spreading content across multiple, distributed servers.



UKDrillas an unidentified group, took to Twitter on Saturday to claim responsibility for the attack on Wikipedia servers.



The account was shut down and it was stated that it had targeted internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Chicago, and other cities. These hubs for routing serve Twitch and Blizzard Gaming.



The Daily Swig asked both exchanges have been asked to confirm whether they experienced issues in connection with the outages. Amsterdam's routing hub, AMS-IX, confirmed that it had no issues with its platform.


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