Daily Tribune patrons have lately complained of difficulty in accessing the newspaper’s website which at times also crashes, something that initially editors attributed to the rise in following of the broadsheet as a result of its hard-hitting opinion pieces and exposés that involve some of the most influential personalities of the land. Among the recent inside stories carried by the newspaper

was President Rodrigo Duterte’s rant against concessionaires Manila Water and Maynilad which he told the Tribune in a pre-State of the Nation Address interview were “duping” consumers for a long time since both do not have water treatment facilities but collect fees for these through the monthly bills.

The paper also recently ran an exclusive series on irregularities in the privately-formed Philippine Southeast Asian Games

Organizing Committee (Phisgoc) that led to the President Rodrigo Duterte telling the Daily Tribune that he will not allow the body to handle preparations for the country’s hosting of the 30th Southeast Asian Games next month. Instead, the government will undertake it.

Moreover, the publication also

has been consistently coming out with stories on electoral fraud, power grab attempts, manipulated surveys, wanton corruption and shady deals with foreign entities in keeping with its “without fear, without favor” motto.

With the stellar rise of the newspaper, it seems like many competitors are

keeping a tight watch.

Trolls unleashed

The default reaction is that it can always be blamed on trolls — repugnant and unwanted hired hands that pounce in any opportunity to malign, degrade, or even flood the website with unnecessary activity to prevent regular readers from accessing the site properly.

Upon review of the digital infrastructure, many bots were found accessing the system which was the result of a distributed denial of service attack.

With an anticipated traffic of x number of online readers daily, the trolls can multiply clicks to access articles and portions of the website to slow down the load, making it reach an xx number of “online readers” accessing the site at the same time inorganically.

No one can blame trolls, or those behind them, if these actions were done with malicious intent out of the covetousness of success. It is always flattering to be the subject of one’s envy. But even then, these trolls have become more sophisticated than what conventional knowledge could encompass — all with the help of some other little friends in cyberspace.

Attack of the bots

The online team of the daily said that beyond an increase in individuals accessing the website, “upon review of the digital infrastructure, many bots were found accessing the system which was the result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.”

Disruptions to the online presence of government websites were also attributed to such intrusion. DDoS attacks result in servers crashing and sites going down. Popular services such as Netflix, Reddit and other popular sites have experienced such attacks.

Working on the principle of overloading a website’s ability to handle multiple requests at one time, a DDoS attack makes a web service unavailable. Such an overload means that legitimate visitors and users are denied access.

Lines busy

A simple analogy would be that of a customer trying to get through a call center to complain about a defective product he bought, but who is frustrated with the long wait because other customers are clogging the lines of the call agents.

In the case of bots, there are no real flesh-and-blood people clogging the lines but mere sof tware programs that bar access to the Daily Tribune website by its readers.

For baby boomers when phone landlines were still shared by “party-lines,” having bots in the system is like having a party-line who hogs the phone 24/7.

Effective nuisance

DDoS attacks have been proven to be an effective way to disrupt web services, for instance from a competitor in the business.

Daily Tribune is not new to online attacks. In 26 July 2010, af ter the presidential elections won by Benigno Aquino III, its website was hacked resulting in its website not showing and the page redirected to a malware-infested site. The day was when Aquino delivered his first State of the Nation Address (SONA), and when the Office of the President’s website reopened and first showed content with him as the new “President.”

The publication also has been consistently coming out with stories on electoral fraud, power grab attempts, manipulated surveys, wanton corruption and shady deals.

In 2006, the Daily Tribune also was targeted for closure. The administration of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo ordered a police raid on its premises following a declaration of the state of emergency.

Still, experts said that an unintentional denial-of-service can occur not due to a malicious attack but simply as a result of a sudden enormous spike in popularity. This can happen when an extremely popular website posts a prominent link to a second, less well-prepared site, for example, as part of a news story.

The result is that a significant proportion of the primary site’s regular users — potentially hundreds of thousands of people — click that link in the space of a few hours, having the same effect on the target website as a DDoS attack.

The rise to the top can be fraught with danger.