Pressure on Independent Media Outlets Mount

Unfortunately there have been more than a few reports circulating in the past few days of attempts to shut down a media outlets in Egypt, most prominently being OnTV which is notorious for providing live updates on protests around the country. One such media outlet that has fallen victim to the increased pressure is the Arab West Report, my former employer, whose website was hacked last week leaving their website inaccessible. To this day, an error message pops up when trying to access the site.

This is a great shame as AWR always tried their hardest to provide unbiased news reporting, and would often post investigative reports detailing the "hidden" side of stories related to Muslim-Christian sectarian tensions. The hacking of AWR's website is just one further indication of the worrying stifling of independent reporting in Egypt.

Tensions increasing;
our websites have been hacked
 

Protesters at Tahrir Square chanting anti-President Mohamed Mursi slogans, June 28, 2013.
(Photo by Asmaa Waguih/REUTERS, trough nydailynews.com) 

AWR Cairo, June 29, 2013

 

Our websites have been hacked

 

On Thursday, June 27, our websites were hacked and can no longer be accessed by our IT staff. It seems like our dedicated server in Roubaix/France was hacked completely and the system and the data can no longer be accessed.

 

This also applies to our other websites cawu.org (http://cawu.org/), cidtegypt.com(http://cidtegypt.com/) and others, as they are running on the same system.

 

This means we will have to completely rebuild our website and copy all our data from our backup. This can take up to three days. 

 

Our IT-staff are working on this night and day.

 

We very much regret the inconvenience this has caused and hope to serve you again as soon as possible. 

  

Cornelis Hulsman,

Editor-in-chief Arab-West Report

 

Dieter-Müller-Ehrhard,

IT-Manager