(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
"This has not happened a single time since we started the website in 2009," says the owner of the online newspaper Abdurrahim Günaydin. The Nordic Page has around 60 monthly readers. The newspaper translated and published its version of Ny Tid's investigative case about two Chechen asylum seekers who were rejected from Norway and later found dead in Chechnya in December.
"We can't pinpoint who's behind the attack, because it's very difficult to track. But we are reasonably sure why the attack came and that it was because of this article, ”says Günaydin. "The attack started minutes after the tortured Chechens case was posted."
Lay down for several hours. Abdurrahim Günaydin claims it was a denial of service attack. This happens because the hackers using Trojan virus take control of many private computers without the owners knowing about it. After taking over a large number of computers, hackers order all of these machines to access a particular website, simultaneously and constantly. This causes the web pages to crash because hundreds of thousands of machines enter a web site at exactly the same time. This is what happened 18. December with www.tnp.no:
“Since ours was down three times because of these attacks. The Nordic Page was inaccessible for several hours while it was on, ”Günaydin explains.
"The attack started minutes after the tortured Chechens case was posted."
Side up again. The Nordic Page now works normally. Günaydin and the editorial team have contacted their security company to try to find out who could be behind the attack. So far they haven't been able to say anything for sure about who the attackers are. The Nordic Page has an office in Oslo. The site is aimed at people in Norway who cannot speak Norwegian, but also people from abroad who are interested in Norway. Half of the readers are in Norway, and half abroad. Outside Norway, the online newspaper is the most widely read in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom.
Report points to Russia. After Turkey shot down a Russian plane this autumn, Turkish authorities' websites were subjected to massive hacker attacks of the same kind that hit The Nordic Page. The same thing happened to websites in Estonia in 2007, when the Baltic country came into conflict with Russia over a bronze statue in memory of fallen Soviet soldiers. The websites of the Georgian authorities were also taken down in 2008, when they ended up in a military conflict with Russia. The renowned and worldwide IT security company F-Secure writes in a report that the Russian government has ordered and financed hacker attacks worldwide for seven years. The report "The Dukes – 7 years of Russian Cyberespionage" shows that the Russian authorities actively use hacking against websites, organizations or countries they dislike. F-Secure believes that the Russian authorities have paid several hacking teams to launch both attacks to take down pages, or espionage to extract information. Al Jazeera writes that the IT security company Symantec also in a report from 2014 believes that the Russian government is behind extensive use of hacker attacks.
