THE editor of a long-running pro-independence website has called on supporters for help after facing months of attacks on its servers.
Mike Small, the co-founder of Bella Caledonia, set up a funding drive in response to the repeated Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
The consistent cyber-attacks, which involve the perpetrator trying to make a network unavailable, see users unable to gain access to the website and error messages appear – and the Bella Caledonia team blocked from entering their system.
To ensure that Bella Caledonia can operate properly, Small has made the decision to move to a “dedicated enhanced server” which will result in hundreds of pounds of extra costs for the independent publication.
“You really can’t tell [who’s behind it’],” Small told The National. “It could be a political thing but equally some of this is random, some of this is bodies just causing chaos.
“It would be nice in a way to think it’s political or the deep state attacking me,” Small joked. “But it may not be, I really don’t know. I just know that it’s been going on for months.
“We’ve been trying different things to protect ourselves. We were being flooded with spam which I couldn’t process, and all of the spam filters couldn’t cope with the scale of the attacks.
“So then we had to put up this thing called CloudFare which meant when you came to our site it had a kind of warning, which I think looked really bad – because it looked like our site was broken even though it wasn’t.”
Small said that for a small publishing team, the cyber-attacks are challenging – leading to more costs when budgets are already tight.
“I think probably bigger media operations have got sophisticated technical defences and smaller independent media like myself are working on small budgets, so it’s maybe easier to take us down, we’re maybe a bit more vulnerable.”
Small has been assured that moving to the new enhanced server will bring an end to the challenges.
These problems have come as Bella Caledonia, which publishes comment pieces and features from contributors across Scotland, plans to launch two new projects.
“We were just about to launch an upgraded site, a bit of a redesign, so that’s on pause. And we’ve been working on a new podcast as well,” he said. “Those are two big projects that are just on pause until we get the site secure again.”
You can donate to the Bella Caledonia funding drive here.
