Trinity News, Ireland’s oldest student newspaper and one of College’s main news publications, announced today that it has been victim of an online cyber attack, rendering its website useless for the time being. The announcement came via an Instagram story on the Trinity News official account after the site had been down since yesterday night.
“Late last night, various cloud-service computers across mainly the US, Europe, and Russia started a coordinated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the Trinity News website. As a result in this spike of activity, our hosting provider decided to temporarily shut down the website servers”. said Sean McGoff, TN’s Online Editor, in a statement to the University Times.
The attack at first appeared as a replacement page to Trinity’s otherwise prolific website, stating simply “account suspended”. Later, this page was replaced by an unrendered human verification screen that was impossible to bypass.
It remains unclear why the newspaper was specifically targeted, yet lead editors are confident that it is a temporary issue that will cause no lasting damage to the site.
“As of right now, we have found a solution to hopefully mitigate this issue, and are working with our hosting provider to get the server back up within the next day or so”, said McGoff.
“Trinity News apologises for any inconvenience this may have caused anyone”, added Aoibhínn Clancy, Editor-In-Chief of TN.
— UPDATE Saturday, August 16th, 9:53 am —
An older version of the Trinity News website now appears to be back online, with the most recent viewable articles being published close to the end of 2023: viewing the site is only possible once users have completed human verification.
— UPDATE Saturday, August 16th, 7:23 pm —
The Trinity News website is now fully back online.
