Government denies involvement in Manuel Delia website cyber attack

The government has denied having any connection with a series of Distributed Denial of Service attacks on blogger Manuel Delia’s website, which resulted in the website going offline multiple times in the past days.

In a statement, the government said it was “strongly denying any involvement in the alleged cyber-attack on Manuel Delia’s website, as Mr Delia implied on the Times of Malta.”

“This allegation from Mr Delia is totally unfounded,” it added.

Delia’s website, manueldelia.com, had been taken offline on 16 May - a date marking seven months since the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia - and was also forced offline again in the weekend, following what the blogger said were heavy DDoS attacks on the hosting servers, located abroad.

In a statement published on Facebook, Delia said that he had asked the police cyber crime unit to investigate the attack, the source of which, he maintained, was probably “professional hackers working from a base of operation outside Malta, likely Ukraine.”

Times of Malta reported today that Delia had said he thought the attack was “funded, motivated and commissioned by the Maltese government.”

However, he also said that while the scale of attack indicated it was done by professionals, it was hard to prove who was behind it.