Press Release: News Investigators Survives ‘Brute Force and Denial of Service Attacks’

Posted by African Examiner Latest Headlines, Press Releases Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015

* Stories “They’ Don’t Want Published

BALTIMORE, MD (AFRICAN EXAMINER) – News Investigators, one of Nigeria’s leading online investigative newspaper has survived a “brute force and denial of service attacks”.

As expected, the attackers launched a heavy bombardment from anonymous IP addresses.

It is not clear who is behind this latest series of attacks, but the aim is certainly to cripple our operations and deny us the opportunity of honouring our avowed commitment to expose corruption in high place.

The attack became rampant since the commencement of investigations into the alleged mismanagement of staff’s pension by the leadership of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), Nigeria’s replica of the American CIA and Senator Bukola Saraki’s alleged money laundering cases, two reports due for publication soonest.

Our investigation of Saraki is anchored on the inconclusive report of the Police’s Special Fraud Unit on allegation of money laundering, where it was discovered that with the help of Guaranty Trust Bank, Saraki laundered the money to the United Kingdom on American Express Credit Card.

Both the FBI and UK’s Metropolitan Police are cooperating with us on the latter investigation.

According to the report, all cash lodgments between 18/05/2009 and 12/06/2009 were ‘washed’ through transfer into fixed deposit account on 17/06/2009. Bulk of these funds were deposited in bits i.e less than $10,000.00 per cash deposit entry to ensure that the cash lodgments doesn’t fall within the transaction to be reported to CBN/NFIU as suspicious according to Foreign exchange regulation.

On 17/06/2009 the total cash of $250,000.00 was transferred to pledged ledger and credited back to the account on 7/09/2009 to regularize a debit balance, the bank must shed light on this.

On the following dates 12/02/2010, 15/02/2012 & 16/02/2010, Sun & San/Bukola Saraki, Munigann Trading & Serv. Ltd/Bukola Saraki, Limkers Nig Ltd & Ulip Cocoa Processing Ltd transfered the sums of $1,200,000.00, $1,000,000.00, $150,000.00 & $42,000.00 respectively into the customer’s account and on same days these amounts were converted to GBP.

On 28/08/2009, consolidated cash lodgments of $250,000.00 was placed into time deposit account and later terminated and returned with interest on 26/03/2013, that same day $250,800.00 was transferred to a foreign account of the customer via SWIFT.

On July 30, 2015, the attackers hacked into one of our official email addresses, at the early hour, sending over 11,000 spam messages in less than 24 hours, resulting in Error 522 Ray ID: 20ebbc9ce8db13b9 • 2015-07-31 19:34:00 UTC.

“An Error 522 means that the request was able to connect to yur web server, but that the request didn’t finish. The most likely cause is that something on your server is hogging resources,” was the initial message we received.

But for the timely intervention of our team of experts from within and abroad who worked round the clock through the weekend to restore sanity, the agent of darkness who presumably is unhappy with the light we beam on critical national issues, would have wreck some havoc.

On August 2, ZD Net, a U.S. based technology news platform reported the FBI warning of DDos extortion cases.

The FBI warned businesses that they are at an increased risk of being extorted by malicious actors threatening network flood attacks.

In an online bulletin at the Internet Crime Complaint Center, which works in conjunction with the FBI and other agencies, the agency warned that “the victim business receives an e-mail threatening a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to its website unless it pays a ransom.”

On behalf of our publisher and the entire management team, we express our profound appreciation to our teeming readers for their concerns.

We appreciate all the calls and messages, assuring you of our determination to serve you better.

Nuel Suji, Editor.