Belarusian Investigative Center
The Belarusian Investigative Center (BIC) is an independent nonprofit newsroom dedicated to exposing corruption and debunking disinformation from authoritarian regimes, primarily in Belarus and Russia. Due to its critical reporting and investigations, BIC is frequently targeted by malicious cyber activity aimed at silencing its voice and restricting access to reliable information.
“We're a nonprofit organization with limited resources in cybersecurity,” said Wladyslaw, IT manager for the Belarusian Investigative Center. “Yet we are regularly targeted by state-backed actors who see our reporting as a threat. That puts a major strain on our digital infrastructure.”
BIC’s focus on exposing disinformation campaigns makes it a prime target for cyberattacks, particularly distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. “We view these DDoS attacks as online censorship and attempts to block access to the truth, " said Wladyslaw.
In September 2024, BIC faced one of its most severe cyberattacks to date. Starting on September 20th, their website had over 300 requests per second, forcing the organization to change server addresses to regain control. Over the course of two weeks, the site received an overwhelming 89 billion requests, with peak traffic reaching 30 billion requests.
“Our site was effectively taken offline,” recalls Wladyslaw. “We had no choice but to act quickly.”
Joining Project Galileo
With help from Project Galileo partner, Internews, BIC quickly onboarded to Cloudflare to help mitigate the attack.
“Cloudflare’s team responded to our application within 24 hours,” BIC noted. “That fast reaction was crucial. Once we onboarded, the DDoS attacks immediately stopped.” Cloudflare’s infrastructure automatically identifies and mitigates the vast majority of malicious traffic before it reaches BIC’s server. “At present, fewer than 1% of all requests are flagged as threats. That shows attackers are still probing us, but they’re failing.”
“If it wasn’t for Project Galileo, we would be forced offline repeatedly. We wouldn’t be able to provide stable access to our investigations or updates,” said Wladyslaw “Many Belarusian media outlets in exile are under siege from hostile state actors. Cloudflare gives us the stability to keep working, even under pressure.”
BIC continues to provide fact-based, independent journalism in the region. “Cloudflare works silently in the background, making sure we stay online,” said Wladyslaw “It gives us the freedom to focus on what matters, our mission to uncover the truth.”
