Moroccan News Agency Hit by Cyberattack Amid Regional Tensions

Access to the MAP’s websites was very erratic for a good part of Monday due to a cyberattack. "The various websites of the Moroccan Press Agency (MAP) have been the target, since last Monday, of a Deny service (DDOS) attack, which has caused many disruptions making their access difficult," the news agency confirmed in a statement. It is convinced that "this serious incident can only be explained outside the geopolitical tensions weighing on the region, as evidenced by the intensity of this cyber-attack against a public institution."

"The MAP engineers noted an abnormally massive flow that saturated the bandwidth of the Internet links where these sites are hosted, before declaring the incident to MACERT, the Monitoring Center of the Directorate General of Information Systems Security (DGSSI)," the same source specifies, ensuring that "once the attack was observed, the agency’s engineers set up a crisis cell with their partners to prevent a total unavailability of the websites and strengthen the security at the level of the security devices put in place to deal with the disruptions that may occur."

The MAP will also explain that a "denial of service attack is a computer attack aimed at making a service unavailable and preventing legitimate users of a service from using it."