The Shift News is experiencing a vicious cyber attack aimed at taking the site down, following the publication of a series of investigative stories on the scandalous hospitals deal.

The site is being targeted by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which essentially involves flooding a website server with traffic from multiple sources until the site crashes. Such attacks are designed to take websites and servers offline at critical times. They are often politically motivated.

“The fact that our site is under attack after the revelations published on the millions stolen from taxpayers with the government’s blessing, shows the lengths they are prepared to go to to hide their shady deals. The attack tells us we are on the right track. We will not stop,” said Caroline Muscat.

The Shift Team is working round the clock to counter the attacks. “It is a well-funded, professional attack. We have managed to fend them off so far. And we will continue to do so. Thanks to the support from our readers, we have built the best security system we could. Of course, no system is perfect, but even if the site goes down our stories will be published elsewhere. You can’t stop us,” Muscat added.

The attack started after the publication of the third story in the series this morning, showing how the hidden owners of Vitals Global Healthcare (VGH) funded the €5 million purchase of Technoline and then awarded themselves exclusivity of supply.

It built on another two stories published by The Shift News revealing for the first time the agreement signed between VGH and Steward Healthcare that the government kept hidden from the public.

The agreement revealed shows that Steward acquired VGH for only €1. For that price, Steward got a concession worth €70 million per year, or €188,000 per day, from Maltese taxpayers for potentially 99 years and €7 billion in revenue.

Millions changed hands on the deal behind the public’s back – The Shift News details the names of those hiding behind offshore companies.