On Tuesday, Aug 20th, the Aish.com website, a website dedicated to spreading Jewish wisdom to English and Spanish audiences, was hit by a major DDOS cyber attack that started at 10:45 a.m. Israel time, and continued for 6 hours. The scope of this attack, which saw over 219 million requests in that span of time, is unprecedented in the history of the website or the Aish organization.

Director of Technology and Computer Programming for Aish.com Shraga Botwinick said “I was immediately notified by our monitoring tools that we have in place with regard to the unusual activity. After investigating the issue I noticed a major DDoS attack. As a result of the attack, the website stopped responding for between 5-10 minutes when the attack was initiated, but following that pause our internal security systems kicked in and the site began functioning normally once more.”

The organization reports that no information was lost or stolen in the attack and that the Israel National Cyber Directorate was contacted upon learning of the attack.

In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting the services of a host connected to a network. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.

The Aish.com website has previously been hit with similar but much smaller DDoS cyber attacks since the beginning of the October 7th war. In May 2024, following one such attack, the organization added a significant amount of extra security protection to prevent these attacks from affecting service on the site which is visited by more than 1 million users per month who are seeking to learn more about Judaism, Israel, and connect to their roots.

Rabbi Steven Burg, the CEO of Aish, who is currently attending a Jewish Heritage mission in central Europe, expressed his thanks to the staff for their handling of the situation and said that he “is not surprised” by the incident. “Israel and the Jewish people are under attack on all fronts, both physically as well as in the cyber world. Aish is an a-political organization but because we are dedicated to strengthening the Jewish people by spreading Jewish wisdom and Jewish values, we too are under attack. I want to thank the excellent staff, especially Shraga Botwinick, for their expert handling of the situation. These attacks are part of the delegitimization tactics used by our enemies to harm any attempts at Jews standing up for themselves or strengthening one another. But Aish will continue to do just that, spread Jewish Wisdom, speak up for the Jewish people, and strengthen all Jews around the world, no matter who or where they are.”