Tempo Hit by Massive DDoS Cyber Attacks Following Online Gambling Coverage

April 10, 2025 | 09:39 pm

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The Tempo news website has been hit by a massive cyber attack following the publication of a report on online gambling since Sunday, April 6, 2025. A massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack targeted the Tempo server at 1:00 p.m. on that day, four hours after the digital article about online gambling was published on the Tempo website, with request accesses reaching 479 million in two hours.

The attacks have persisted to this day, Thursday, April 10. At 4:00 p.m., there were 2.6 million attempted accesses. Cumulatively, the DDoS attacks since Sunday have amounted to nearly 3 billion requests, affecting public access to the articles on the Tempo.co website, especially premium articles featuring online gambling coverage. 

Tempo's Editor-in-Chief, Setri Yasra, explained that the massive DDoS attack also disrupted the customer pages. According to him, this cyber attack seemingly wants to hinder public access to information on the Tempo website, making it difficult for readers to enter the website or read the news articles.

Setri likened the DDoS attack to a traffic jam during the Eid homecoming travel season, where vehicles crowd previously empty roads, making it difficult for travelers to enter the congested routes. Some are held at the entrance or trapped in congested areas, similar to the error pages on Tempo’s articles.

The Tempo technology team, Setri said, has so far been able to anticipate DDoS attacks by strengthening digital security systems and examining customer access routes so that readers can still access news on Tempo. 

Setri cannot confirm whether the DDoS attack is related to Tempo's coverage of online gambling. In fact, as the website was paralyzed for quite some time due to the surge of request access, readers could not read articles apart from the online gambling coverage on the website.

According to Setri, the initial DDoS attacks originated from various countries, but have been since centralized for the past two days. From Cambodia, for example, the attempted accesses surged more than 200 percent. 

Besides Cambodia, some of the more recent attacks originated from local sources within Indonesia. "The local attacks are troublesome because we cannot block them," he said. "But we have been able to control it."

He hopes the DDoS attacks will cease because information is the constitutional right of the people. He received reports that other media servers reporting on DDoS attacks on Tempo are also paralyzed due to the flood of attempted accesses.

The DDoS attack is not the first one faced by Tempo. When the pig's head terror occurred on March 20, 2025, the Tempo website was also temporarily disrupted, resulting in delayed articles about the terror attacks.

In the following days, cyber attacks against Tempo have grown in frequency, but were “not as massive” as the DDoS attacks the website experienced since publishing the online gambling coverage.

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