The Daily Blog, New Zealand’s most important leftwing website of news, views and analyses at the heart of the country’s most conservative mediascape in years, has been hacked.
It was silenced yesterday for several hours but is back up and running today.
The Daily Blog editor and founder Martyn Bradbury launched the website in 2013 with the primary objective of “widening political debate” in the lead up to the 2014 New Zealand election.
Since then, the website has united more than “42 of the country’s leading leftwing commentators and progressive opinion shapers to provide the other side of the story on today’s news, media and political agendas”.
It has 400,000 pageviews a month.
“These moments are always a mix of infuriation and terror”, admitted Bradbury in an editorial today about the revived website and he raised several suspected nations for “cyber attack trends” such as “China, Israel and Russia”.
Bradbury, nicknamed “Bomber” by a former Craccum editor at Victoria University of Wellington, was once branded by the NZ Listener magazine as the “most opinionated man in New Zealand”
The website includes columns by such outspoken writers and critics as law professor Jane Kelsey, Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson, Palestinian human rights advocate and quality education critic John Minto, political scientist Dr Wayne Hope, social justice academic and former leftwing politician Sue Bradford, and political analyst Morgan Godfery.
It also hosts the popular live podcasts by The Working Group, which tonight features pre-budget “Economists of the Apocalypse Special” by Bradbury, with Matthew Hooton, Damien Grant and Brad Olson at 7.30pm on its revived website.
‘Sophisticated and tricky’
Explaining why The Daily Blog was displaying a “maintenance page” for most of the day, Bradbury said in his editorial:
The hack was very sophisticated and very tricky.
Thank you to everyone who reached out, these moments are always a mix of infuriation and terror.
We can’t point the finger at who did it, but we can see trends.
Whenever we criticise China, we get cyber attacks.
Every time we criticise Israel, we get cyber attacks.
Every time we criticise Russia, we get cyber attacks.
Every time we post out how racist NZ is, we get stupid cyber attacks.
Every time we have a go at New Zealand First’s weird Qanon antivaxx culture war bullshit we get really dumb cyber attacks.
Every time we criticise woke overreach we get cancelled.
This hack on us yesterday was a lot more sophisticated and I would be surprised if it didn’t originate offshore.
We have a new page design up and running in the interim, there will be updates made to it for the rest of week as we iron out all the damage caused and tweak it for TDB readers.
You never know how important critical media voices are until you lose them!
Bradbury added that “obviously this all costs an arm and a leg being offline” and appealed to community donors to deposit into The Daily Blog’s bank account 12-3065-0133561-56.
The Daily Blog can be contacted here.
