Las Vegas Sun: Cyberattack Behind Website Outage

Officials at the Las Vegas Sun say a cyberattack crashed their website for several hours Tuesday morning.

Donn Jersey, the publisher of the website and its sister sites, says the outage apparently started a little after 6 a.m., and was under control by about 10 a.m.

Jersey says it’s unknown who’s behind the move. The newspaper’s site has experienced similar attacks multiple times in the past year, including a severe one on Thanksgiving Day 2012.

The outage is described as a DDoS attack, which stands for Distributed Denial of Service. The scheme involves a hacker commanding a fleet of remotely controlled computers to flood a website with traffic, preventing the system from processing legitimate requests.

Users visiting a hacked site would see a blank page.