Join on WhatsApp
Join on Telegram
Rabat – Moroccan news agency Maghreb Arab Press (MAP) was the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Thursday, the agency announced.
A number of the agency’s sites were down following the attack on Thursday night.
“This dangerous incident cannot be explained outside the context of regional geo-political tensions, which are reflected in the severity of this cyber attack on a public institution,” the agency said.
Engineers on MAP’s websites noticed an unusual amount of traffic coming through the sites, and proceeded to inform the cyber attacks watch center MACERT of the General Directorate for Information Systems Security (DGSSI).
The agency said it set up a crisis cell to prevent its websites from shutting down completely and has strengthened its security devices to face disruptions that may occur.
A denial of service attack seeks to make targeted machines or networks inaccessible to legitimate users by disrupting their services. This is usually accomplished by flooding the target of the attack with access requests in an attempt to overwhelm their systems.
The type of DDoS attack that MAP was targeted with requires traffic from several different sources, making it increasingly sophisticated and challenging to accomplish.
The news comes a few days after Algeria’s state-owned news agency APS accused Morocco of being behind a cyber attack on its websites.
The news agency claimed that Morocco was among the “geographical sources” from which the attack originated.
“This series of electronic attacks has been located according to the geographical sources of the Zionist entity, Morocco and certain regions of Europe,” APS said. “Technical measures and the agency’s defense systems have made it possible to repel this series of attacks which are still in progress.”
The accusation was the latest in a string of allegations levied towards Morocco for allegedly attempting to destabilize Algeria.
In August 2021, Algiers accused Rabat of being behind wildfires that devastated the Kabylia region in northern Algeria. Morocco denied the allegations.
