Local.fo was rendered inaccessible on Thursday owing to a so called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
Starting at around noon, users who visited Local.fo saw an error message instead of the actual webpage. By 6 p.m., the site was working again, though it was slow to load.
In a statement to Local.fo, Local.fo CEO Mr. Torleif Joensen pointed out that it is safe to assume that hacktivists took down the site in protest of Tuesday‘s slaughter of 210 white-sided dolphins, which took place in the village of Hvalvík.
“It appears we were attacked by some cyber-trolls after we published the story about the Hvalvík dolphin slaughter,” Mr. Joensen stated.
A distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet. Distributed Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.
This is not the first time Local.fo has been hit by a DDoS attack. In May, hackers took aim at Local.fo following the Gøtuvík Beach whale slaughter, where around 150 pilot whales were killed.
Image credits: Kringvarp Føroya
