Malta Under Large Scale Attack

Maltese journalist Manuel Delia has warned on his blog that his island country is being targeted by Ukrainian hackers in what he described as one of the most vicious cyber-attacks in Maltese history.

“The storm has been raging for most of this week and every effort of the technical team to counter the attack is met by a vicious onslaught on some other vulnerability of the website,” Delia said in an article on The Shift News. 

“The great bulk of the attack comes from Ukraine, though computers from all over the globe are being used to complement those waves. The website’s engineers say it is a well-funded, professional attack on a scale rarely known to be used on other websites in Malta.”

Delia is being targeted by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which essentially involves flooding a website server with traffic from multiple sources until the site crashes. His original software defences were breached, but the blog is now back online and Delia said he is weighing up other options to prevent future cyber-attacks. 

Warning that Malta has been taken over by a “crime syndicate”, Delia suggested the cyber-attack on his blog was due to his criticism of the government.

“Several Maltese news-sites who carry criticism of the government suffer from many forms of intimidation: coordinated trolling and hate campaigns, direct intimidation of authors and cyber-attacks of varying degrees of power. The one manueldelia.com is under right now just happens to be larger than most.”

“Many people make the mistake of thinking that cyber-attacks are fair game. No one bleeds when they are a victim of one. These are crimes with a single mindless intent, no different and no less harrowing than the arson at the Times of Malta building forty years ago, without the risk of physical harm.”

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