(Natural News) If you tried to visit Natural News and several of our affiliated websites including popular search engine GoodGopher.com over the past 48-plus hours and were unsuccessful, you certainly were not alone. That’s because we were hit with a highly sophisticated DDoS — direct denial of service — attack that our founding editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, believes was directed by a U.S. government agency.

In an interview, Adams explained that the offensive was very likely generated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regarding a White House petition seeking a moratorium on childhood vaccines.

The petition — located here — notes:

American children are in crisis with an explosion of once-rare neurological problems like autism and seizures.

Recent scientific evidence has shown massive contamination of vaccines with unsuspected chemical and biological agents. Other evidence shows dramatic differences in health outcomes between vaccinated and un-vaccinated children.

The DDoS attack was at “a very high level,” Adams said, adding that its level of sophistication means “it must have cost somebody a lot of money” to coordinate and carry out.

“It seems the attack has been linked to the White House petition story,” he noted, adding that the petition link went down as well, but has since been reinstated.

“Somebody’s spending a lot of money because” the attack “lasted for more than 12 hours. At one point, there were over a quarter of a million connection requests per second.” That’s “a level of attack that requires a tremendous amount of coordination and funding.”

“We suspect that the CDC is using taxpayer money to fund a cyber warfare campaign against vaccine truth web sites” like Natural News, Adams continued. “We already know the CDC is using taxpayer money to run vaccine propaganda, to pay for pro-vaccine messages in pop culture” like movies, TV shows, and other entertainment venues.

The agency also has a history of conducting and publishing its own vaccine-promotion research, then getting it into publication.

“Cyber warfare is just another tactic they’re using” to target anyone who disagrees with the pro-vaccine message, Adams said, noting that the attack Natural News suffered for much of Sunday evening and Monday morning was too sophisticated to have been carried out by a small group.

“This is probably millions of dollars’ worth of coordination, malware, zombie PCs that have been taken over,” he said. “It’s not an amateur running kiddie scripts.”

What’s also noteworthy, Adams said, is that he’s received no ransom demands, meaning the DDoS was not a “ransomware” attack aimed at extorting funds from the company. “This is not just some random hacker group, this is just someone who’s trying to destroy us, period,” he told me. (Related: See the top six BOGUS ‘science-based medicine’ claims all based on faulty research.)

“This is all part of an ongoing censorship campaign against vaccine truth,” said Adams.

As for the White House petition, it seeks four things:

— Impose a five-year moratorium on all childhood vaccines from birth to age eighteen.

— Repeal the 1986 National Childhood vaccine injury Act and return vaccines to the traditional civil justice system.

— Perform large scale studies of vaccinated and un-vaccinated children.

— Ban direct pharmaceutical advertising to consumers and allow such advertising only to medical professionals.

Adams said he and his engineering team have been hard at work adding extra security to the Natural News site and related networks.

“To defend against the attack, additional defenses were put in place while a firewall upgrade took place, including browser challenge logic that deflected 90% of the DDoS attack traffic. The firewall upgrade means that attacking parties will now need to expend significantly more resources to interfere with Natural News traffic in the future,” he wrote in this post.

He is also seeking assistance in positively identifying the responsible party. “As part of our efforts to expose the criminality and corruption of the CDC, Natural News is offering a $50,000 reward for evidence that conclusively links the CDC to cyber attacks on vaccine truth websites,” he wrote.

Stay tuned.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.

Sources include:

NaturalNews.com

GoodGopher.com