FTM ditches US cybersecurity firm over surveillance and privacy fears – Follow the Money

Source Domain: www.ftm.eu

At 11:55 am on a Wednesday morning, the first message came in. A Follow the Money editor sent a screenshot of the FTM app via the internal communication channels: “502 bad gateway”. Just a minute later, then-editor-in-chief Arne van der Wal sent the message: “SITE IS DOWN”.

An hour later, the website and app were still down. “Looks like a targeted DDoS attack on us,” FTM’s systems administrator told the rest of the company.

During a DDoS attack – short for distributed denial-of-service – attackers send massive amounts of internet traffic at their target until the system is overloaded. The aim? To bring down websites, at least temporarily.

Later that day, FTM publisher Jan-Willem Sanders sent a message to staff: “A massive amount of automated traffic is being directed at us to disrupt our sites – unfortunately, that mission has been successful.”

“Under attack?”

The attack, on 24 April 2024, was the first the company had ever experienced. On that day, the servers had to cope with traffic that was 28,000 times higher than on a normal Wednesday, originating from servers in Russia and Bulgaria. One of the pages that was attacked? The section on the website that collects articles on Russia.

That afternoon, the FTM system administrator scrambled to connect the website to Cloudflare’s services. That firm provides a popular service: The US company “blocks an average of 247 billion threats online every single day for its millions of customers”, according to its website. Independent research found that almost a quarter of all websites on the internet are protected by Cloudflare.

An added bonus: you can connect your systems to it in a flash – even during an attack. It’s no coincidence that the website features a red “under attack?” button; click it, enter your details, and you’ll be protected by Cloudflare “in minutes”.