June 19, 2015

Charleston Paper Investigating Church Shooting May Have Been Attacked by Hackers

The Post and Courier’s website was taken down Friday morning after a possible web attack.

A screenshot of the Post and Courier's website on Friday.

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Charleston’s Pulitzer Prize-winning daily newspaper, the Post and Courier, is investigating the possibility of a “denial of service” attack that shut down its news website for long stretches Friday morning, in the wake of Wednesday night’s massacre at the city’s Emanuel AME church.

“We’re exploring whether it was an infrastructure issue, or whether it was a concerted attack, a DDoS attack,” Mitch Pugh, the newspaper’s executive editor, told Mother Jones Friday morning. Pugh is referring to a “distributed denial-of-service” attack, which renders a website useless by overwhelming its servers with automated requests for information. “It’s starting to look like someone tried to take our site down,” he said, though he warned it’s still too early to say for sure, despite “early indications.”

The Post and Courier first posted about the outage at about 7 a.m. Friday morning, via Twitter. But problems persisted. The website was inaccessible for “20 to 30 minutes at a time, sporadically,” across the morning, Pugh said. The companies responsible for hosting the website, he noted, are “telling us that they are seeing activity on their end that would indicate a DDoS attack.”

The site’s outage comes amid the newspaper’s second major international story in as many months, after the death of Walter Scott in North Charleston in April. The outlet has been aggressively covering the Charleston church massacre since Wednesday night, producing up-to-the-minute coverage on its website by throwing between a half and a third of its newsroom (of about 80 people) at the story, Pugh says. Covering such an intense story has been emotionally and physically draining for everyone: “We’re trying to get people more into a shift mode and get some mental health breaks, and some downtime to get some rest,” he said.

“A lot of our folks know people who were either in the church or close to people in the church,” he added. “So it’s certainly an emotional, difficult time for everybody.”

Pugh said the newspaper was working with its hosting companies—NewsCycle Solutions and Savvis—to get to the bottom of why the website went offline. In the meantime, the website appears to be back in business:

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

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