SEATTLE — A cyberattack took down The Seattle Times website for about 90 minutes Monday.
Seattletimes.com was unavailable from about 8 to 9:30 a.m. due to a denial-of-service attack, spokeswoman Jill Mackie said.
“The Seattle Times website experienced technical problems Monday morning due to an external attack that appears to have targeted other sites,” Mackie said in a statement. “We continue to monitor the situation and apologize for any inconvenience this caused readers.”
Denial-of-service attacks flood a website with requests, overwhelming servers and preventing it from responding to other users. The result is a site that grinds to a halt or runs so slowly that it becomes unusable. Such attacks aren’t designed to damage a target’s computer systems or steal files.
The attacks have been blamed on culprits from political operatives to young, tech-savvy hackers.
The ease with which such attacks could be orchestrated was illustrated in 2000 when a 15-year-old Canadian boy, under the alias “Mafiaboy,” temporarily brought down the websites of Yahoo, CNN and Amazon.com, among others.
