Las Vegas newspaper shakes off cyberattack

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LAS VEGAS, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- The Las Vegas Sun said its company website and those of three sister companies were shut down by hackers this weekend.

The site was back in action Sunday after being disrupted for several hours beginning Friday night.

Cybersecurity experts told the Sun it appeared the newspaper was the target of a Distributed Denial of Service assault that overwhelmed the Greenspun Media Group servers.

Some users found themselves being redirected from the Sun's website to Las Vegas Weekly or other Greenspun sites.

"We worked literally around the clock to solve the problems stemming from this attack, and we'll keep working until service is completely back to normal," said GMG Managing Editor Ric Anderson.

Analysts said the DDOS attack was likely the result of thousands of computers being lumped into a "botnet" without the knowledge of their owners. The identity of the perpetrators was unknown Sunday and likely to remain a mystery due to the far-flung nature of botnets.