Suspected DDoS attack impacts AP news site

The Associated Press reports that its news website was impacted by an outage believed to be caused by a distributed denial-of-service attack. Such an outage, which loaded the apnews.com site but not individual article links, began on the afternoon of Oct. 31 and was resolved the following morning, according to AP, which noted that its mobile apps and customer delivery systems have not been impacted. While AP Media Relations Manager Nicole Meir said that an investigation into the reason behind the outage continues, Western news outlets have been warned by self-proclaimed hacktivist operation Anonymous Sudan of DDoS attacks on the morning of Oct. 31, with the group later updating its site to include screenshots of AP and other news sites. Anonymous Sudan's claims, which Recorded Future analyst Alexander Leslie noted is part of the group's "simple" propaganda mechanism purporting massive success from a short-lived intrusion, have not yet been verified.