Trying to figure it out, but more immediately to fix it
We have been here before.
In 2008 a bot coming from China sucked up all of our bandwidth and shut down the website. The immediate thought was that it was this obnoxious guy, a competitor at the time and a shill for every scam that would pay him to be such, behind it. We took steps to get thepanamanews.com back up, and only some time later did we get a clue about who it actually was. A new website host added a “most viewed articles” feature and by using that and following up it turned out that a few weeks before we had run an article about a Falun Gong event in Parque Omar some weeks before. SOMEBODY connected this article, via London and Prague, across China’s Internet firewall. Hundreds of thousands of people in China saw it. Falun Gong is officially deemed an “evil cult” by the Beijing authorities and here’s this little website in Panama defying their blackout ban, albeit without a thought about publishing in China? The Chinese government, or somebody working on their behalf or thinking that he, she or they were doing so, retaliated against us. Sometime after that the US and Chinese governments came to an uderstanding or sorts and China eschewed such Internet warfare.
In 2013, 2014 and 2015 a series of hacks shut down The Panama News website several times. We think from surrounding circumstances that it was one politically motivated person and his camp in Panama, using the Israeli NOS company’s Pegasus system, then various more ordinary criminal elements piling on to send out spam ijn the name of our website’s dedicated email address. After a series of battles we regained control of our name and website and set up a WordPress site. There were immediate attacks with bundles of spam messages in the comments section, aimed at overloading and shutting down the website. That’s why we have no comments feature on the website itself. Make your comments on one of our social media extensions, the Facebook page or the Twitter / X account. We are fairly sure on whose behalf the Pegasus attack was made and have some compelling clues about who the computer nerd who actually did it was. None of it would stand up in a Panamanian court, although in a US process that includes interrogatories, depositions and compelled production of documents we might have a winning case. Whether we could afford the litigation is another matter. Almost certainly the US National Security Agency has files that would indicate who did what and even more certainly they would not share such data to help The Panama News.
NOW we use the usual log-in button for our wordpress.org website and get a message coming from somebody calling themselves wordpress.com, demanding payment to register our website with them. It’s a criminal hacking scam and if it’s very widespread is a major attack on the small, independent online news media. We found a way back into our website but so far not a way to complain to wordpress.org. We are working on it.
Knowing the published history of WordPress hacks, there has been a rash of them that were used to send out illegal commercial spam messages. If you get some email saying that it’s from The Panama News or from WordPress – most probably purporting to sell you some product or service – it’s something that belongs in your spam file. For one thing, we are reader supported and do not sell ads. Malicious jerks MAY be able to buy off The Washington Post or The Los Angeles Times, but not The Panama News.
Bear with us. We are not omniscient, nor do we have the resources to hire Internet sleuths to chase down and expose the hackers and the people who employ them. We ARE, however, doing the best we can to protect our readers. Hence this message. If you have anything to report, do so on our Facebook page or via our Twitter / X account.
To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.
Para defendernos de los piratas informáticos, los trolls organizados y otros actos de vandalismo en línea, la función de comentarios de nuestro sitio web está desactivada. En cambio, ven a nuestra página de Facebook para unirte a la discusión.
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These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information. Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web.
