STE WILLIAMS

The non-profit group Nature of Change claims to be the victim of a politically motived DDoS and hacking attack after it debunked a report into the health benefits – or lack of same – of organic foods.

At the start of the week Stanford University published a report suggesting that organic foods contain about the same nutritional value as non-organic foods, and are not necessarily safer. In response, Nation of Change published a step-by-step rebuttal of the study – but its website was hit almost immediately by a DDoS attack that took down its servers.

Such attacks aren’t uncommon these days, since any script kiddy can download free code to stage a DDoS with very little resources. But the group says the attack was followed up by a hacker that got into their servers and tried to delete the article itself.

The group experienced a similar attack last year which also tried to remove information from their site. That piece, entitled “Hungary Destroys all Monsanto GMO Corn Fields“, was briefly removed from the site by unknown hackers.

“The attacks show nothing more than the fact that organizations with serious vested interest in deception and fortified corruption are desperately clinging on to any shred of credibility that they have left,” the group said. “By the way, we cannot confirm at the time who issued the attacks. What we can say, however, is that it is an organization with large scale capability.”

After a lengthy upgrade, the website is now back online and functioning normally. El Reg contacted Nature of Change for additional information and comment, but received no response in time for publication. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/06/charity_ddos_attack/