A group of Russia-linked cybercriminals claims it was behind a major attack on the Times of Malta website, purportedly to fight “those who support sanctions against Russia”.
The so-called People’s Cyber Army of Russia called on its followers to target Times of Malta in a message posted to a Telegram group named ‘People’s CyberArmy’ on Tuesday at 7.57am.
The attack, known as a Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, overloaded Times of Malta servers and breached existing protections in place, causing the website to go offline for most readers for around 45 minutes at its peak, after the Telegram group was instructed to “attack”. It continued until 10am on Tuesday.
The attack was purely external and no data breach is suspected.