Wikipedia suffered intermittent outages as a result of a malicious attack

The popular free online encyclopedia Wikipedia was not reachable following what it has described as a “malicious attack”.

Popular online reference website Wikipedia went down in several countries after the server of the Wikimedia Foundation that host it were hit by a “massive” Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

The news of intermittent outages was first disclosed by the organization in a tweet on Friday.

Wikipedia has been experiencing intermittent outages today as a result of a malicious attack. We're continuing to work on restoring access. #wikipediadown

— Wikipedia (@Wikipedia) September 7, 2019

Wikimedia Foundation also confirmed the attack and informed the users that its experts were already working to restore normal operations. The organization did not attribute the attack to a specific threat actor, we cannot exclude that it was a demonstrative attack to test the firepower of a DDoS botnet that is a available for rent.

“Today, Wikipedia was hit with a malicious attack that has taken it offline in several countries for intermittent periods. The attack is ongoing and our Site Reliability Engineering team is working hard to stop it and restore access to the site.” reads the statement published by the Wikimedia Foundation. “As one of the world’s most popular sites, Wikipedia sometimes attracts “bad faith” actors.”

Today, Wikipedia was hit with a malicious attack that has taken it offline in several countries for intermittent periods. The attack is ongoing; our Site Reliability Engineering team is working hard to stop it and restore access to the site. https://t.co/cu9AXWFaTG #Wikipediadown

— Wikimedia Foundation (@Wikimedia) September 7, 2019

Wikimedia condemned the malicious attacks and pointed out that it threatened “everyone’s fundamental rights to freely access and share information.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Wikipedia, DDoS)

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