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Timesofmalta.com claims it was victim of ‘possible cyber attack’
Allied Group says website’s success made it susceptible to ‘denial of service attack’
Last week, the Times of Malta erected its premium paywall
The Times of Malta has claimed its website experienced a sudden increase in requests "in what could have been a cyber attack", the newspaper reported today.
The site experienced a denial of service attack which the Times said was "usually associated with a malicious attack on a website".
"We cannot be 100% sure that we were attacked before we go through all the logs," development manager Darren Gordon said. "But at the moment, our priority is to get the website up and running."
The Times website went down on Tuesday afternoon, a week after the Allied Group put up its first ever paywall for premium subscribers to access its print stories in digital.
Gordon said a denial of service attack occurred when a website is suddenly inundated with requests to access the site. The sudden surge, he said, did not allow for developers to increase server capacity accordingly.
A spokesman for Allied Group was quoted as saying that the success of the Times had made it "susceptible to such attacks... it is unfortunate that this organisation has become the victim of what seems to be a directed and concerted cyber attack."
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Good move by Tom. Kasko will be paid an installment with his new system. At least
I hope so. Thus the times can rebuy her freedom from Keith. Keep it up Mario. obviously I will look for Maltese news elsewhere.
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if it was a 'cyber attack', I can't say i'm surprised. I live in London, all I can read of their articles is the headline and first paragraph. in these austere times I could only afford the subscription by cancelling the holiday to malta. i trust TOM will be giving partial refunds to those who have paid for the service they did not receive.
I'm happy with MaltaToday, gives me all i need to keep in touch.
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if it was a 'cyber attack', I can't say i'm surprised. I live in London, all I can read of their articles is the headline and first paragraph. in these austere times I could only afford the subscription by cancelling the holiday to malta. i trust TOM will be giving partial refunds to those who have paid for the service they did not receive.
I'm happy with MaltaToday, gives me all i need to keep in touch.
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I stopped reading TOM years ago, free or otherwise. Couldn't stand it's "O-levels English" standard of journalism.
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It is a shame that the TOM wants to charge readers, when most of us contribute to the paper. The TOM, like any other Media makes enough money from advertisements and so on and I think it is a very immature decision to charge people for reading the newspaper. The nice thing is that there are other worthy newspapers like the Maltatoday and the Independent that can match the TOM in news and otherwise. I myself have already switched and I am sure so will many others. I think the TOM is trying to blame others because of their greed and poor judgement. Their loss is the gain for the other Media.
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One would not expect such greed from such a small time newspaper with a miniscule market.
However be that as it may I for one will not be viewing the Times website in the future.
Can anyone tell me why someone would pay to read such gibberish journalism & opinions from mouth pieces as IM BECK and the rest of his ILK.
Saviour keep your hands on the wheel and your paper will soon be the biggest english paper in Malta.
This online pay business is too small in Malta to be effective.
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very easy to view page. Just right click on page and choose 'View Source'. Save the to a file to desktop. Click saved file and the page would display the content offline.
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Bit skeptical that is was an attack (google cache still accessed it) since one will notice the difference in data traffic when an attack happens. (100x / 1000x more than average. Data routing might have been the real problem, but people when they dont see the page loading usually will click on refresh or type in the URL again to reload it, usually doing this multiple time so it might create a new request everytime.
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It may just be that there was somebody who was angry at the Times for their money grab! Why did the Times think it was it could charge us who live abroad and who would like to keep in touch with events in Malta?
They want us to pay to even look up the obituaries, which people PAY to have publish and double dip to have people READ them. The Times allows only 10 FREE articles per month for the fee...It should be the other way around - as it is in most newspapers...One reads the news free on only pay for PREMIUM articles. According to the arrogant Times, every article is PREMIUM and one only gets to read a beggarly 10 free articles a month!
Joseph MELI •
IT IS ONLINE NOW AS AT 10.32 hrs
Joseph MELI •
The TOM online site was down for a few hours yeaterday afternoon and came back on early evening- but only sporadically.Today(Wed) it has not been online at all up to now as at 10.30 hrs
