25 August 2021

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[...] [T]he site belonging to Karapatan, a human rights organization in the Philippines, was targeted by a sophisticated, well-resourced dedicated denial of service (DDoS) attack. Traffic flooded in from botnets spread across the world, from Ukraine to Indonesia — all aimed at a single folder on Karapatan’s site, which hosts the group’s reports detailing extrajudicial killings in the Southeast Asian country. Karapatan has long been a target of attacks online by supporters of the Philippines president, Rodrigo Duterte.

Since then, the attack has not let up for a single moment, something that Lündstrom, the technical director of the Swedish cybersecurity nonprofit Qurium, said is unprecedented. “Billions of requests, thousands of dollars spent on feeding garbage 24/7, night and day,” Lündstrom told Rest of World. “They just keep going and going and going.”

[...] Lündstrom and his team say they were able to trace IP addresses used in the cyberattack to a network operated by Bright Data, an Israel-based company that offers proxy networks and data services to corporate clients. Bright Data has denied any involvement in the attack.

After the publication of this article, Bright Data reached out to Rest of World again, stating, “Bright Data had absolutely no connection to the reported incident, and the Qurium report is categorically false, unprofessional, and unethical. Qurium approached Bright Data just before they published the false report, and even though Bright Data showed Quirum’s researchers that their report was blatantly wrong, they chose to ignore Bright Data and the facts. Qurium acted recklessly, if not intentionally, without any effort to look into the facts Bright Data presented.”

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