Iceland’s Public Broadcasting Gets DDOS’d Again

Iceland’s public broadcasting service, RÚV, fell prey to another DDOS attack last night, taking their site offline for two hours. A programming director at RÚV told reporters that they take the attack very seriously.

A Direct Denial of Service attack, or DDOS, is a computer attack in which thousands of computers from around the world ping traffic to a website thousands of times per second, resulting in shutting out all other traffic and crashing the site.

This actually marks the second time RÚV has been DDOS’d recently, the previous attack happening only last month.

Baldvin Þór Bergsson, a programming director at RÚV, told reporters that they are taking the matter very seriously.

“This was an incredibly large attack and lasted a long time, longer than we’ve seen before,” he said. “Our response was to direct traffic away from ruv.is to prevent any damage and protect our users, as the goal of the attack was to crash the site.”

RÚV’s security department are currently examining how to prevent future attacks from happening.

DDOS attacks are usually coordinated by a botnet, a network of connected computers that are often themselves hacked by malware in order to perform the attack. The use of a botnet makes identifying the attacker and defending against a DDOS difficult, as the attack comes from thousands of different locations at once.