The RÚV website experienced a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on Monday night, RÚV reports, leading the state broadcaster to block all traffic to the website as a precautionary measure. The website was unavailable for almost two hours during the attack.
A DDoS attack is a cyber-attack in which a web server is flooded with thousands or even tens of thousands of requests in order to overload the system. Last night’s attack was the second of its kind that RÚV has experienced recently, a fact which Program Director of New Media Baldvin Þór Bergsson says the broadcaster is taking very seriously.
“This was a tremendously large-scale attack and it lasted for a long time—longer than we’ve ever seen before. Our response was to direct traffic away from ruv.is in order to prevent damage and protect our users…” Baldvin Þór said that the attacker(s) had failed in their goal—to cause the website to crash—and that this had, in part, been due to the broadcaster’s decision to direct web traffic elsewhere.
Baldvín Þór said that these kind of cyber-attacks occur every day, pointing to a similar DDoS attack that was made on the Danish state railway operator DSB over the weekend.
