Newsweek | Newsweek Newsweek suspects hackers crashed website because of negative Trump article

Newsweek suspects that hackers are to blame for the crash of its website on Thursday night, after it published an article about Donald Trump’s company secretly conducting business in Cuba in the 1990s.

"We don't know everything. We're still investigating," Newsweek editor in chief Jim Impoco told POLITICO. "But it was a massive DDoS attack, and it took place in the early evening just as prominent cable news programs were discussing Kurt Eichenwald's explosive investigation into how Donald Trump's company broke the law by breaking the United States embargo against Cuba."

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A DDoS attack, or distributed denial of service attack, is when an attacker attempts to overwhelm a website or server with traffic, rendering it unable to function reliably.

As of Friday afternoon, Impoco told POLITICO that the main IP addresses involved in the hack were Russian, but that there was "nothing definitive" about the ongoing investigation.

The magazine’s cover story, “How Donald Trump’s company violated the United States embargo against Cuba,” was posted online around 5:30 AM on Thursday. By Thursday evening, a "fairly sophisticated" attack took Newsweek’s website down "for hours," Impoco said. Newsweek's IT team worked through the night to get the website back online, he said.

"It would either be a big coincidence, or it had to do with this story," Impoco said Friday. " ... We were fortunate that some other sites picked up the story so that people could still read it."

In the story, Eichenwald reported that a company controlled by Trump “secretly conducted business in Communist Cuba during Fidel Castro’s presidency despite strict American trade bans that made such undertakings illegal.” The piece also reported that senior officers in Trump’s company attempted to make the business undertakings “appear legal by linking it after the fact to a charitable effort.” Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway confirmed on ABC’s “The View” that one of the payments Newsweek reported occurred.

The news magazine first suspected that the website crashed because of the number of people viewing the article.

"Last night, @Newsweek crashed from flood of ppl trying 2 read story about Trump breaking Cuban embargo," Eichenwald, the author of the piece, wrote on Twitter Friday. He later tweeted that the publication suspected hackers were behind the crash of the website.

Newsweek's IT team is still investigating the attack. We will continue to update this post as more information becomes available.