Aish.com was hit with a major DDOS cyber attack on Tuesday at 10:45am Israel time, which lasted for 6 hours. The giant attack included over 219 million requests, a scope that is unprecedented in the history of Aish.
Shragga Botwinick, Aish Director of Technology and Computer Programming said “I was immediately notified by our monitoring tools that we have in place with regard to the unusual activity. After investigating the issue I noticed a major DDoS attack. As a result of the attack, the website stopped responding for between 5-10 minutes when the attack was initiated, but following that pause our internal security systems kicked in and the site began functioning normally once more.”
According to the organization, no information was stolen or lost as part of the attack. The Israel National Cyber Directorate was informed of the attack.
This type of attack used against Aish is a cyber attack in which the attacker attempts to flood the targeted machine or resource with a huge number of requests, to try and overload the system and prevent some or all real requests from being filled.
Aish says it has been hit with numerous such attacks since October 7th, but that this attack was the largest in scope. Following an earlier attack in May, Aish says it added a significant amount of extra security to protect their site, which sees over 1 million visitors a month.
The CEO of Aish, Rabbi Steven Burg, thanked his staff for handling the attack, and said he is “not surprised” by it. “Israel and the Jewish people are under attack on all fronts, both physically as well as in the cyber world. Aish is an a-political organization but because we are dedicated to strengthening the Jewish people by spreading Jewish wisdom and Jewish values, we too are under attack. I want to thank the excellent staff, especially Shraga Botwinick, for their expert handling of the situation. These attacks are part of the delegitimization tactics used by our enemies to harm any attempts at Jews standing up for themselves or strengthening one another. But Aish will continue to do just that, spread Jewish Wisdom, speak up for the Jewish people, and strengthen all Jews around the world, no matter who or where they are.”
{Matzav.com}