Did the Obama Administration Hack Drudge Report?

First, a very quick tutorial for those who might need to be brought up to speed. A DDoS or distributed denial of service attack is a technique that groups can use to shut down a targeted website.  Depending on the sophistication of those implementing the attack, it take a major site down for many hours.

What it basically consists of is flooding a site with so many requests that the site cannot handle them all.  It would be analogous to a drive-up window at a fast-food place that can handle one customer a minute suddenly being swamped with 100 bogus customers arriving at the window per minute.  The result is nothing moves.

The well-known conservative website, Drudge Report, suffered just such an attack today.  And it was right after publishing a headline that would not please the Obama administration.

A tweet from conservative media icon Matt Drudge’s verified Twitter account Thursday night appeared to accuse the government of interfering with his website, DrudgeReport.com, just hours after the Barack Obama administration announced new sanctions against Russia over election hacking.

https://twitter.com/DRUDGE/status/814642127707717632

It’s no secret that the Drudge Report has been a very unpopular site within both the Obama and Clinton administrations.  But would the government really retaliate against Drudge?

Drudge Report was down briefly around 7 p.m. EST, but working hours later. The top headline read: “MOSCOW MOCKS OBAMA ‘LAME DUCK'” Meanwhile, the conservative Washington Times wrote: “Matt Drudge suggests U.S. government cyberattack on Drudge Report website. DDoS attack comes same day Obama announced countermeasures against Russia for hacking of Democrats.”

Conservatives on Twitter also accused the government of shutting down the Russian news website, RT. “Numerous reports of Russian state-run Network RT being unavailable. Drudge Report also under ‘Biggest DDoS attack since site’s inception,'” wrote one user.

Attacking the Drudge Report is an especially dumb idea. Its readers are highly engaged and highly loyal. If Obama apparatchiks think they can just pull the plug on Drudge without turning over a few million hornet nests, well, they’re just plain stupid.

Government officials have wrangled with Drudge before over his alleged false claims. With 2 million daily unique visitors and around 700 million monthly page views, DrudgeReport.com was the top site for referral traffic in 2014 to the Daily Mail, CNN, Fox News, Roll Call, Breitbart, The New York Times, USA Today, Associated Press and other news sites. Its readers were loyal, staying on the site for an average of 30 minutes, Politico reported.

“People are religious in how they come to Drudge,” Vipul Mistry, Intermarket’s Business Development manager, told Politico’s On Media blog. “When we analyzed all our audience that’s what it is, people are on there not only in morning, they tend to leave it open as it refreshes.”

Given all the other nefarious acts the Obama administration and its minions such as Hillary Clinton have orchestrated, you’d almost be shocked if an attack like this didn’t happen.

Source: International Business Times