Attacks on CyberEthiopia.com

20 March 2013 (CyberETH) – For the past few weeks, our web site CyberEthiopia.com has been the target of coordinated cyber attacks which caused serious disruption to our services.

The assaults on CyberEthiopia.com started in late January with denial-of-service attacks (a launch of an unusually high volume of traffic) thereby creating slow or intermittent access for some of our end users. The cyberattacks also combined tactics that injected malwares to our site as a result of which our end users had their browsers warning them that our site could infect their computers.

We were initially obliged to shut down our services since constant monitoring was required and took this ‘incident’ as an opportunity to launch a new and improved web site .

We have also gathered technical evidences to determine the exact origin and source of these attacks and are taking legal measures against the perpetrators.

Launched in 1996, CyberEthiopia.com is one of the oldest ethiopian web site engaged in stimulating the growth of the Ethiopian Information Society and pionnering in bringing the millenary Ethiopian Alphabet on the World Wide Web. In particular, it hosts a highly popular discussion forum in Amharic (Warka). The web site won the First Prize winner of the African Information Society Initiative (AISI) in September 2005 and was selected among ICT success stories in Africa at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

Since May 2006, CyberEthiopia.com has been blocked in Ethiopia along with many other pro-democracy popular Ethiopian web sites with an apparent objective to prevent the dissemination of information that is critical of the regime in Ethiopia. 

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