The website of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) has been targeted by a large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that slowed access and made it difficult for readers to reach its reporting. The attack began on Monday and is ongoing.
The assault appears to involve a large international botnet and a level of coordination that suggests significant resources. The attackers have adapted their tactics in response to defensive measures, indicating what OCCRP’s security team described as a “human element” behind the operation. The source of the attack has not been identified.
Recent upgrades to OCCRP’s digital infrastructure prevented a complete outage. Without those improvements, the website would likely have been inaccessible for many hours, the security team said. The site remains online, though users may encounter additional verification steps designed to block automated traffic.
DDoS attacks flood websites with massive volumes of traffic from compromised computers around the world, overwhelming servers without directly censoring content. News organizations, government agencies, financial institutions, human rights groups, and nongovernmental organizations are frequent targets of such attacks.
For example, in 2016, a massive DDoS attack temporarily knocked The New York Times, the BBC, and other major outlets offline by overwhelming internet infrastructure, showing how cyberattacks can disrupt journalism without censoring content. The assault used the Mirai botnet, which hijacked hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices such as webcams and routers. By overwhelming servers of a company called Dyn, attackers effectively knocked large parts of the internet offline, temporarily preventing readers from accessing news sites.
Security experts said the attack demonstrated how DDoS assaults can silence journalism indirectly—not by censoring content, but by making it unreachable during critical news cycles.