Hours after New York published its powerful cover story containing testimony from 35 women who said they were assaulted by comedian Bill Cosby, the site was unavailable, knocked down by an apparent cyber attack.
The culprit appears to be a hacker who referred to his or herself as “ThreatKing” and tweeted under the handle “Vikingdom2016” on Twitter. The hacker offered different justifications for the attack: Speaking to The Daily Dot, ThreatKing said the strike was motivated by a dislike of New York City. In a Skype conversation with Poynter, Vikingdom2016 said the attack was launched for “many reasons” and made reference to “pranks.”
http://t.co/2ccZiBJBdj #OFFLINE again.. :D
By ThreatKing and @Parallelized
— Vikingdom2016 (@Vikingdom2016) July 27, 2015
As of 2 p.m., the site was up again after a brief outage after noon. In a statement to Poynter, New York didn’t have anything to add beyond its initial tweet announcing it was “experiencing technical difficulties.”
But the magazine took several steps Monday to ensure that its cover story was available in spite of the alleged attack. Just after noon, the magazine announced that it had posted the entire 1,700-word takeout on its Tumblr page, where it began accumulating notes. The staff included its supplemental interviews with the women on Tumblr so that the bulk of the multimedia package was available off-site.
The magazine was also fortunate in that it began publishing excerpts from its interviews with Cosby on Instagram after the story was released, so readers could listen to some of the most compelling elements of the story despite not having access to New York’s website.
The lynchpin that tied New York’s off-site content together was its promotional strategy. After the site was taken down, the magazine’s social media team mobilized on Twitter and Facebook to send traffic to the magazine’s various social channels to ensure its audience knew when and where to look for supplemental content.
Screenshot, New York magazine’s Facebook page.
Hear Janice Dickinson tell her story about Bill Cosby on our @instagram: http://t.co/EjHA3ZXAPR pic.twitter.com/rrUmThjmuM
— New York Magazine (@NYMag) July 27, 2015
One lesson that can be gleaned from New York’s strategy is that the distributed model of publication makes journalism particularly resilient in the face of cyberattacks. And these tactics are likely to prove useful in the future as news organizations fall prey to hackers. A recent report in Columbia Journalism Review noted that several news organizations — including the Albuquerque Journal and Maryland CBS affiliate WBOC — have recently been targeted by hackers who affiliated themselves with a group called the “CyberCaliphate.” According to the story, newsrooms are particularly vulnerable to the growing threat of cyber attacks because they lack the resources to put security measures into place or train their employees on best practices around security.
But even if money or time is too tight to implement heavy-duty security measures, New York’s response today shows that crafting multiple versions of the same article on different platforms can protect journalism and preserve access to important work.
