Mystery Hackers Target Conservative Site

Drudge Report repeatedly taken offline
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 12, 2017 4:17 AM CST
Mystery Hackers Target Drudge Report
Matt Drudge suspects the government is trying to take down his website.   (Drudge Report)

Matt Drudge believes somebody is trying to take down his popular conservative website—and that somebody could be the federal government. He says the Drudge Report has been repeatedly knocked offline in recent weeks by hacker attacks, including one on Dec. 30 that was the biggest distributed denial of service attack in the site's 20-year history. Cybersecurity experts tell Business Insider that while accusing the Obama administration of taking the strongly pro-Donald Trump site offline may be off the mark, it would definitely take extensive resources to launch a DDoS attack, which involves flooding a server with requests, against a site that gets as much traffic as Drudge's does.

Ajay Arora, CEO of cybersecurity firm Vera, believes only a small number of groups and nation-states worldwide have methods sophisticated enough to take Drudge offline for long periods. He says tracing the attacker will have to involve looking at the motive as well as technology. "There's a lot of people that don't like Matt Drudge," he says. "He likes to push people's buttons. Anyone who he specifically has knowledge of, who would be out to get him." In a now-deleted tweet, Drudge claimed the attack had "VERY suspicious routing" and said "of course" none of the suspicious traffic was "traceable to Fort Meade," headquarters of the NSA. (More Drudge Report stories.)

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