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Conservative Website ‘Drudge Report’ Blames U.S. Government For Cyber-Attack

By Nick Younker
Published on: 16:56 PST, Dec 30, 2016

Drudge Report is a conservative website devoted to promoting and disseminating conservative agendas, all of which have been a major sticking point for those on the left that accuse the site, among others, of propagating fake and misleading news reports.

Just like many other news websites, no matter what side they lean to, Drudge Report also has a presence on social media, including Twitter. Although the only Twitter account that is registered as Drudge Report does not have an “official confirmed status,” the owner of the website, Matt Drudge, does.

So when President Obama announced sanctions against Russia on Thursday along with expelling many top Russian diplomats from the United States following the reports of Russians hacking the U.S. election, Drudge Report experienced a “denial of service” attack. That attack, which basically paralyzed the Drudge Report site by flooding it with more visitors than it can handle, left Matt Drudge accusing the federal government of hacking his site and making it go down during a major event.

For those who are unfamiliar with Drudge Report, it is not a normal news site that reports its own stories. Instead, it locates stories from around the web and posts links to those stories on its main page. It is basically a news aggregator that does not post its own reports based off other people’s material. Instead, Drudge Report simply posts links to the aggregated news on its website and people go there for referrals to other sites, particularly for conservative news.

According to a report on Deadline, the DDoS site hack of Drudge Report lasted about 90 minutes, which can be a lifetime for people who are trying to get out on top of breaking news when it is happening. With such an intense political climate as of late, the timing could not have been more suspicious for Matt Drudge, according to his Twitter posts about the attack.

The DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on Drudge Report adds to the growing distrust that conservative-minded people already have of the U.S. government. It only stands to further deepen their conspiracy theories when the U.S. president is a liberal that has pursued domestic and international actions that further the progressive cause.

Matt Drudge took to Twitter two times on Thursday and disseminated his conspiracy theory that the U.S. government was behind the DDoS attack that paralyzed his Drudge Report website during the breaking news on Russia.

To help put this in better context, since Drudge Report is a conservative website and the Russians were recently exposed as the people who hacked and interfered in the election that resulted in Donald Trump winning the presidency, conservatives have been calling the claims a hoax perpetuated by the liberal left and democrats, although the intelligence about Russian meddling came from all U.S. intelligence agencies.

To help give you better perspective about Matt Drudge, his Twitter page features a black bio picture and a black background picture. He has 459,000 followers and he follows no one. Matt Drudge has made exactly two tweets on his account, both of which were on Thursday in regards to the DDOS attack on Drudge Report, both accusing the U.S. government of the attack.

It might also be worth mentioning that since Matt Drudge released his two only tweets on Twitter, one of them has been retweeted 4,700 times and another has been retweeted 1,300 times.

Although the Drudge Report website is back up and running, it is unclear at this time just how much proof Matt Drudge has that the U.S. government did initiate a DDOS attack on his website. He has not reported any of the results of his investigation following the hacking incident, nor has he made any further tweets on Twitter regarding the incident.

[Featured Image by Evan Agostini/Getty Images]

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