By
Jorge Luis Sierra
A recent cyberattack against a news
website in Panama, on the eve of World Press Freedom Day, shows how journalists
and bloggers who try to reveal corruption, electoral rigging and inefficient
public policies become the target of digital warfare.
This warfare can include
cyberespionage, creation of fake accounts on social media, launching of
defamation campaigns via Twitter or Facebook, as well as massive attacks such
as Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS) or defacements. Most
journalists, bloggers and media organizations rely heavily on the Internet, but
lack the skills to prevent or face those attacks.
A major attack against the website of
TVN2, a major television company in Panama, sheds light on the vulnerability of
media organizations that seek citizen engagement to fight for clean elections
and the rule of law. In the week leading up to the May 4 national elections in
Panama, after the news organization launched Yo Informo, a crowdsourcing project to track
electoral fraud, community issues and broken promises from candidates, a
digital attack shut down the entire website of TVN2. (The Yo Informo platform
was built as a part of the Initiative for Investigative
Journalism in the Americas, a flagship program of the International
Center for Journalists.)
The attack in Panama, probably a DDoS
attack, affected the entire TVN2 website, except for Yo Informo, which
apparently has better built-in security features.
“It seems to be a modus operandi of
people attacking the media,” said Sandra Crucianelli, an investigative journalist
who as a former ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellow developed a data journalism team at La Nación of
Argentina.
Crucianelli is a consultant on the Yo Informo project. Her own
hyperlocal news site Sololocal was itself a
target of a cyberattack in 2013 during the general election in Argentina.
The news media as a community need to
learn from the Panama experience and accept that we need to protect all news
websites involving citizen engagement, transparency and accountability from
digital attacks.
TVN2 and Sololocal are just two
examples of a global trend. Media organizations around the world are
experiencing major cyber attacks that put at risk their entire online
infrastructure. "Twenty-one of the world’s top-25 news organizations have
been the target of likely state-sponsored hacking attacks," according to
Google research reported by Reuters.
To see the dimension of the trend of
digital attacks in the world, Google Ideas and Arbor Networks developed a map to provide a
visualization of the DDoS attacks as they are happening every day.
ICFJ Knight Fellow Miguel Paz, creator
of Poderopedia, the digital platform that tracks who is who in
the world of politics and business says, “all Fellows should consider these
issues.” He refers to the ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellows, who
work across Africa and Latin America developing digital tools, spurring
innovation in newsrooms and engaging citizens. He is right: Innovation must go
hand in hand with security these days.
Paz is launching new chapters of his
award-winning platform Poderopedia in Venezuela and Colombia, countries where
cyberattacks have been a common practice against journalists and bloggers. Over
the last two years in Venezuela, journalists were the target of 27
cyberattacks, five attacks on websites and four penetrations of personal
accounts, according to Periodistas en Riesgo Venezuela, a crowdsourcing map launched recently by ICFJ and
the Inter American Press Association.
While journalists, bloggers, Knight
Fellows and media organizations are at risk, they now have some tools available
to help them. Here are some lights at the end of the tunnel:
- Google’s Project Shield is now offering protection against DDoS attacks to all websites using the Google infrastructure without having to move their hosting location.
- eQualit.ie provides protection against DDoS attacks for independent journalists through the Deflect platform, a global network of servers designed to soak up the tidal waves of DDoS requests.
- Qurium is a media and human rights tech foundation that provides secure hosting and cyberattack mitigation.
Jorge Luis Sierra is director of the ICFJ Knight
International Journalism Fellowships.
Image CC-licensed on Flickr via Scott Hart.
Source: http://ijnet.org/blog/press-freedom-threatened-digital-attacks-world-press-freedom-day
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