One hour after the 21 Group blog published a post about Roshaan Khattak — an exiled Pakistani scholar researching enforced disappearances and state killings in Balochistan, who received death threats while based at Wolfson College, Cambridge — on 10 September, the site was hit by tens of thousands of requests from servers in Pakistan. The blog says attacks have continued two or three times a day since, with repeated attempts to reach personal information such as email addresses that did not succeed, and that later waves were more distributed, routed through cloud servers in the Netherlands. Its assessment is that the signature is consistent with automated monitoring of the internet for mentions of an individual followed by determined efforts to take the story down. The campaign follows attacks on the Index on Censorship's online magazine this summer, one of which briefly knocked it offline in April after a story on the same scholar.

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