The website of Bahrain’s leading Arabic newspaper was brought down in a massive malicious attack yesterday (Saturday), the day the country went to the polls.  

And though the Akhbar Al Khaleej website was put back on line and accessible throughout the region and the rest of the world, it was still inaccessible in parts of Bahrain as of this evening.

The website www.akhbar-alkhaleej.com was the target of a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, under which a malicious software or system generated thousands of requests every few seconds to the site, causing it to collapse under the weight of the traffic and become unavailable to users.

“The US-based Peer1, which is one of the world’s leading hosting providers, informed us that the website was under attack, after which our engineers managed to restore services by changing the site’s IP address,” said a spokesman for Bahrain’s North Star Technologies, which manages the newspaper’s site.

He continued: “However, it was still inaccessible from some parts of Bahrain as Batelco’s DNS server grappled to route traffic to the site’s new IP address.”

Batelco has acknowledged it has issues with its sever and was working hard to resolve the matter, he said, adding that the telecommunications operator was endeavouring to restore full access to the site “before the end of the day”.

The oldest and most respected Arabic daily newspaper in Bahrain, Akhbar Al Khaleej has been forthright in condemning the political unrest that has gripped Bahrain since 2011 and was previously targeted by hackers.

Yesterday's elections for 40 seats at the Council of Representatives, parliament’s lower house, attracted a voter turnout of 51.5 per cent. Bahrianis also voted to elect Municipal Councillors and the turn out was 53.7 per cent. Elections are held every four years.  - TradeArabia News Service