Wikipedia was hit with a DDOS attack
Wikipedia suffered a malicious cyberattack that caused websites in multiple countries to go offline. The attack occurred on September 7, 2019, and was mainly affected by users in Europe and the Middle East. The downdetector.com website recorded the attack and received thousands of reports.
von einer 'Distributed-Denial-of-Service attack'. Da beim DDoS-Angriff die Anfragen von einer Vielzahl von Quellen ausgehen, ist es nicht möglich, den Angreifer zu blockieren, ohne die Kommunikation mit dem Netzwerk komplett einzustellen." 3/3
— WikimediaDeutschland (@WikimediaDE) September 6, 2019
The Wikimedia Foundation’s German Twitter account indicates that the company’s website is experiencing a large-scale distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. A DDOS attack can cause the target server to flood a large amount of traffic, thereby destroying its service available to the target user.
Wrote in the official blog post:
As one of the world’s most popular sites, Wikipedia sometimes attracts “bad faith” actors. Along with the rest of the web, we operate in an increasingly sophisticated and complex environment where threats are continuously evolving. Because of this, the Wikimedia communities and Wikimedia Foundation have created dedicated systems and staff to regularly monitor and address risks. If a problem occurs, we learn, we improve, and we prepare to be better for next time.
We condemn these sorts of attacks. They’re not just about taking Wikipedia offline. Takedown attacks threaten everyone’s fundamental rights to freely access and share information. We in the Wikimedia movement and Foundation are committed to protecting these rights for everyone.
Right now, we’re continuing to work to restore access wherever you might be reading Wikipedia in the world. We’ll keep you posted.
