This is the second day Jornal Madeira has been offline, after a deliberate cyber attack. I wish them all the very best and hope they can get their system back up and running very soon.
This below is a message posted on their Facebook page.
Yesterday without access to the usual informative content made available through the domain ‘jm-madeira.pt’. The platform collapsed after 1.4 million simultaneous accesses were recorded in just under 15 minutes.
At the end of the night, after a long journey to transfer data to a new IP, JM Madeira’s digital platform suffered another cyber attack again with over 1.2 million hits simultaneously, purposely to ‘bring down’ the computer system.
The two incidents are already being investigated by the CNCS-Centro Nacional de Cibersegurança, an entity that acts as operational coordinator and national authority with State entities, national Critical Infrastructure operators, operators of essential services and digital service providers, ensuring that the cyberspace is used as an area of freedom, security and justice, for the protection of sectors of society that materialize national sovereignty and the democratic rule of law.
There are already several clues that the authorities are investigating, given the characteristics of the two attacks carried out yesterday. The first points to local interference, given that the target is the domain ‘jm-madeira.pt’, among other suspicions that are being investigated. Technological sector experts made the first association with different stakeholders in the PROcience 2020 projects, whose incentive systems reach high values. The topic has been the subject of several recent news in JM.
Until the authorities arrive at more conclusive data, and while the ACIN technical team, which assures assistance to the JM platforms, tries to restore our newspaper’s information platform, we can only appeal to the understanding of all our Subscribers and Readers. We will do everything we can to return to news normality through the digital platform that complements this print edition and which has been achieving a remarkable performance during the current pandemic.
There is also the guarantee that JM will not be silenced, no matter how sophisticated the barriers. Until the complete restoration of the ‘jm-madeira.pt’ domain, you can continue to follow our news content on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, in addition to the paper edition.