On 31 October 2024, the website of online news outlet MOST, which reports on news in the southern region of Kherson, went offline as a result of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that the outlet was subjected to in the afternoon hours. The news was reported on by Serhiy Nikitenko, the editor-in-chief of the outlet.
“The attack began at around 2:00 p.m [and] it is very powerful, as our protection services have not yet been able to cope with it, as a result of which the site is temporarily offline,” Nikitenko said in a comment provided to Ukraine’s Institute of Mass Information (IMI), a press freedom group, following the start of the incident. It was not clear when the website was able to resume normal operations.
According to Nikitenko and his colleagues, the DDoS attack was likely linked to a series of MOST’s recent publications about the construction of underground schools in Kherson, which are being designed across Ukraine in an attempt to guarantee schoolchildrens’ safety in the context of regular Russian attacks. In the case of the school project in Kherson, MOST had formulated accusations that the schools’ construction could have led to corruption of public officials.
“Nearly since the first day that these scandalous constructions started, we have been following the topic, which already led to a [physical] attack on our colleague Olena Hnitetska, through whom a representative of the contractor attempted to send me some strange “greetings”, which we clearly perceived as pressure on independent media,” Nikitenko added, alluding a recent incident which is the subject of a separate alert.
According to the editor-in-chief, on October 30 MOST published an exclusive comment by the head of the Kherson region military administration, Oleksandr Prokudin, on the fact that regional authorities decided not to build part of the planned schools following numerous reactions and protests by local residents.
“According to my information, this publication was very painfully received by people from the circle of head of the Kherson city military administration, Roman Mrochko, and I can assume that this [DDoS attack] is a kind of revenge for our position [on this case],” Nikitenko told IMI.
The officials which Nikitenko accused of being behind the DDoS attack were not known to have responded to the accusations, and these could not be independently verified.