Pattern of cyber-attacks against "leftist" populist news journals

"Sabotaged"
2014-07-08 from "Common Dreams" [commondreams.org]:
I’m not paranoid. And I’m not a conspiracy theorist.
But sometimes the evidence just keeps piling up and makes you realize that ‘they’ really are out to get you.
We’ve been sabotaged.
Over the past year the Common Dreams website has been facing repeated malicious breaches and massive, coordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks from unknown perpetrators. These attacks cause our servers to repeatedly overload and crash—often taking us many hours to get back on-line.
Eventually we get the website stabilized and all the pieces working again. And, for a couple months, all runs smoothly.
Until the next attacks begin…
Over time a clear pattern has emerged: they hit us when it hurts most.
Our non-profit media funding model is built much like National Public Radio’s fundraising campaigns: several times a year set a realistic goal; be aggressive for a couple weeks until the goal is met and then leave people alone: no more fundraising until it’s time for the next campaign.
We are now in the midst of our Mid-Year campaign. And, ‘they’ are back. We have been knocked offline repeatedly at the worst possible time for our fundraising.
Before last week, the last two extended attacks came during our Spring 2014 and Winter 2014 campaigns. And... we fell well short of our goals in both campaigns.
Why are we telling our readers about this only now?
We didn’t want to encourage the perps. We didn’t want to let them know they were succeeding in causing us real harm. We didn’t want them to know we had no way to stop them.
But now we think we will soon have a defense against these attacks. Our website platform was built in 2007—light years ago for the internet—and has vulnerabilities that left us defenseless.
Over the next couple weeks we will be relaunching our website on a brand-new platform that will give us protection against the kind of attacks we have been facing.
But for now, we must make our Mid-Year goal. Falling short for a third consecutive campaign could be a fatal blow to us.
Tonight, we are still $32,000 shy of meeting our goal. Can you help us get there?
We can't do it without you!
Gratefully,[signed] Craig Brown for the whole Common Dreams team

P.S. Our online donations are processed by a very secure third party vendor which was not part of the DDoS attacks on our website. Your donations are safe, tax-deductible and deeply appreciated. If we are knocked offline when you try to donate, checks can be sent to: Common Dreams, PO Box 443, Portland, ME 04112 USA.

P.P.S. Our investigative news team is working on a series of articles on other ways Common Dreams and other progressive news sites are being actively sabotaged. Coming soon… stay tuned.