MANILA, Philippines – Ahead of the May 2022 elections, Rappler and a number of other Philippine news websites found themselves at the receiving end of heightened distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
A number of newsrooms, including ABS-CBN news, GMA News, Rappler, Philstar, Vera Files, Altermidya, Bulatlat, CNN Philippines, were affected by the attacks. At their peak, newsrooms struggled to keep their websites up while readers trying to access the sites affected were being served 403 or 404 error messages.
This was not the first time media organizations in the Philippines were targeted. Prior to the DDoS attacks, newsrooms and journalists were subjected to vilification campaigns on social media by pro-Duterte administration social media influencers and social media propaganda channels.
To unmask the attackers, we worked with Sweden-based digital forensics nonprofit Qurium Media to investigate data from the floods to Rappler, ABS-CBN, and Vera Files. Qurium found that one of the methods used by the botnet – the network of devices used to launch the cyberattacks – included tapping several thousands of domains classified as “referrer spam.”
Referrer spam is a black hat digital marketing technique that involves flooding a website with fake visits coming from fake referrer URLs so they would appear in the traffic logs of the target site.
The goal of spammers, according to industry insiders, is to get the attention of webmasters and prod them to click on the URLs in...
Read Full Story: https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/investigative/cyberattacks-black-hat-seo-toxic-links-target-philippine-news-sites/
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