The Nobel Foundation and the Norwegian Nobel Institute have revealed a cyberattack on its network intended at sabotaging last month's award ceremony Livestream.
The cyberattack put the websites under great stress in an attempt to prevent updating and publishing fresh information on the Nobel Prize and Nobel Laureates' accomplishments It is "a long-term threat to freedom of expression," according to the foundation. It stated that it had reported the incident to authorities, however, no information as to who was responsible for the cyberattack had been provided.
As the Nobel community has pointed out, the perpetrators of the DDoS assault are unknown at the moment. However, given the charges against the Nobel panel for making arbitrary selections in the past, an assumption of state-backed hackers were behind the security incident.
On January 21, in a press release, the institution said, "During the Nobel Day while the prize ceremonies were being live-streamed from Oslo and Stockholm, a so-called distribution denial-of-service (DDoS) attack disrupted the www.nobelprize.org and www.nobelpeaceprize.org sites."
DDoS assaults swamp websites with fictitious traffic, causing outages and obstructing access to information. It has also emerged as a weapon for intimidating and harassing websites.
Furthermore, the Nobel Prize committee has been chastised for omitting scholars who made a significant contribution to awarded studies or for overlooking groundbreaking discoveries in favor of rewarding small findings.
Journalist Dmitry Muratov and Rappler CEO Maria Ressa were among the Nobel laureates at Nobel Day 2021, and his keynote speeches emphasized the importance of press freedom and its role in preserving democracy in an era of fake news, disinformation, and the rise of authoritarianism around the world.
Given the political controversies surrounding some of the Nobel Prizes bestowed by the normally prestigious Nobel Foundation, the involvement of a state-backed actor in such attacks would not be unusual.
