Lake County News

“Local Law Enforcement relies upon us to get the word out when they are looking for people and the community relies upon us to keep them informed.”

Lake County News is an award winning, independent online news agency that publishes local news articles seven days a week. They cover everything from local government, schools, and business to community groups and environmental affairs happening in their northern California county.

“We’ve also been recognized by the local board of supervisors for outstanding community service in times of disaster like fires and floods,” commented Elizabeth Larson and John Jensen, co-founders of the agency. “Local Law Enforcement relies upon us to get the word out when they are looking for people and the community relies upon us to keep them informed. Within three years of launch we had eclipsed the readership of the 100+ year old local paper, which doesn’t cover everything we do, but waits till we publish and then rewrites our articles.“

We were covering a corrupt local sheriff when...

“We were covering a corrupt local sheriff,” said Larson, “when our site began to come under heavy DDoS, injection and brute force attacks. Those attacks threatened our ability to publish the news and pay our bills; we viewed them as a direct assault on our First Amendment rights.”

“Those outages would range from minutes to hours,” Jensen added. “One time a complete destruction of the site forced us to do a 17 hour marathon upgrade. Another attack resulted in an inexplicable hardware failure of our server due to high load, which resulted in an expensive replacement.”

As a result of poor site performance from these attacks, traffic to the Lake County News website was down and their ability to sell the ads they need to pay for their business was severely handicapped. Lake County News was soon offered Project Galileo protection against these attacks. “We believe that without Project Galileo we’d have been put out of business,” Larson related.

After mitigating the attacks with Project Galileo, Lake County News reported the attacks to local law enforcement. “Then, the FBI and the Department of Justice commenced an investigation into what was going on,” said Jensen. “That multi-agency investigation resulted in serving multiple search warrants on known associates of the sheriff we were reporting on, and the attacks largely subsided.”