Semanario Universidad, the weekly news publication produced by the University of Costa Rica, saw its website brought down by distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks in late January. Hackers overwhelmed the online magazine’s web servers with up to four million requests and server calls per minute. The attacks, which ostensibly originated from Russia, followed the publication of a political survey on the eve of the presidential elections in Costa Rica, which are still subject to runoff voting.

According to a news article by Jorge Luis Araya of Semanario Universidad, the hacker attacks were launched on January 22^nd and 27^th after they published results of polling sentiment surveys conducted by the Center of Political Investigations and Studies (Spanish initials: CIEP). Those surveys indicated that candidate Johnny Araya of the National Liberation party (Spanish initials: PLN) was losing favor among voters, and that candidate Jose Maria Villalta of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) political party was gaining ground.

As reported by the Costa Rica Star, the elections were conducted in a festive and reassuring display of love for democracy, and none of the 13 presidential candidates were able to capture the 40 percent of votes needed to secure a victory. In the end, the CIEP surveys were not very accurate in predicting the slight advantage gained by candidate Luis Guillermo Solis of the Citizens’ Action Party (Spanish initials: PAC) over PLN candidate Araya. The runoff election between these two candidates will take place on Sunday, April 6^th.

The DDOS attack on the UCR servers seems to have been politically motivated. Online news daily El Pais, a publication that usually takes an opposition stance, can relate to Semanario Universidad’s woes. El Pais was forced to rebuild its entire information technology infrastructure after several attacks traced to mirrored networks in China and India revealed that the attackers may have been in Panama. Incidentally, prior to those attacks El Pais had published incendiary, but factual, information on Canadian mining firm Infinito Gold, the developers of the Sardinal aqueduct project in Guanacaste, and Wikileaks revelations on the dealings of members of President Ricardo Martinelli in Panama.

Semanario Universidad stated that they are considering filing a complaint before the Ministry of Public Security for the purpose of starting an investigation into the hacker attacks. The weekly magazine also remarked its worries about reports of anti-PLN blogs and Facebook profiles managed by Broad Front sympathizers, which were similarly attacked during the electoral campaign.