RWB files complaint about cyber-attack on its website

Reporters Without Borders has lodged a complaint with the public prosecutor’s office in Paris against persons unknown about a cyber-attack on its website just minutes after it posted a release in August about the aggressive methods used by a hacker to harass Benoît Le Corre, a journalist with the Rue 89 website, and Le Corre’s family. Rue 89, Mediapart, Libération and Arrêt sur Images have also filed complaints about similar cyber-attacks on their websites, while several journalists, including Le Corre and Pierre Haski, have lodged complaints accusing the hacker of invasion of privacy and making death threats. Reporters Without Borders filed its complaint on 17 September with the public prosecutor’s office, which has begun an investigation. The hacker is Grégory Chelli, a French citizen living in the Israeli city of Ashdod who is known by the online pseudonym of Ulcan. He has been targeting journalists and news media that, in his view, have been defaming him. In a press release on 7 August, Reporters Without Borders described how Chelli had threatened Le Corre by telephone and had even posed as a police officer in a phone call to his parents, telling them he had been murdered. Less than half an hour later after the release was posted, the main Reporters Without Borders website (rsf.org) was the target of a Distributed Denial of Service attack with traffic surges of more than 6 gigabytes as second, which rendered all of its content unavailable. During the attack, Chelli laconically tweeted “fr.rsf.org down” from his Twitter account, @ulan_violvocal, which Twitter has since closed. Le Corre’s father meanwhile died on 30 September from the consequences of the heart attack he suffered a few days after Chelli managed to send 20 police officers to the family’s home in the middle of the night by making a bogus emergency call and claiming that they were in the process of being murdered.