CybersecurityRussian bloggers fall victim to cyber attacks
Earlier this month LiveJournal, a major Russian blogging site, was the victim of a large cyber attack; bloggers believe that it was a move meant to silence political dissent in advance of the country’s elections; the site was brought down by a distributed denial of service (DDos) attack; SUP, the owners of LiveJournal, said that the recent attacks were the worst in its company’s history and unprecedented in that it targeted the entire website rather than individual blogs; the majority of Russia’s opposition leaders and political activists maintain blogs on LiveJournal that they use as platforms to gain support and spread their message
Earlier this month a major Russian blogging site was the victim of a large cyber attack. Bloggers believe that it was a move meant to silence political dissent in advance of the country’s elections.
LiveJournal, a blogging website that has become immensely popular in Russia, was brought down by a distributed denial of service (DDos) attack where hackers overload a website’s bandwidth by using thousands of computers to simultaneously access it at the same time.
Ilya Dronov, the development manager at SUP, said “Somebody really wants LiveJournal to cease to exist.”
Writing in a blog post, Dronov speculated that the attacks were designed to encourage popular users to switch over to standalone platforms that would be easier to destroy.
The majority of Russia’s opposition leaders and political activists maintain blogs on LiveJournal that they use as platforms to gain support and spread their message.
Speaking on Finam FM radio, opposition figure Boris Netsov, said, “LiveJournal is really a zone of freedom, and the attack on it is preparation for parliamentary and presidential elections. It is pure politics.”
The site was down for several hours on Monday 4 April and again on Wednesday 6 April.
The attacks initially focused on political dissidents who used their blogs to criticize the government and the current ruling party, United Russia.
According to Maria Garnayeva, a cyber security expert at Kaspersky Lab, an Internet security company, the DDoS attack was first aimed at Alexei Navalny who said that United Russia was “the party of swindlers and thieves.”
The phrase caught on and eventually became an Internet meme. As a result, Navalny’s posts quickly became inundated with fiery derogatory comments.
Bloggers found ads on freelancing websites that offered 14,000 rubles per month in exchange for leaving hundreds of spam comments on Navalny’s blog.
The ad could not be traced to any sponsoring organization, but bloggers and political activists believe that the attacks were the product of government authorities operating via Nashi, a pro-Kremlin movement which functions as a proxy.
The movement is believed to follow the orders of influential Kremlin advisor Vladislav Surkov.
Anton Nossik, an Internet entrepreneur and popular blogger, said there is nearly “total correspondence in goals and times between public acts by Surkov’s protégés and the attacks of the cyber criminals.”
LiveJournal was originally created by a college student in the United States in 1999, and in 2007, the site was sold to SUP, a Russian company.
At the time political dissidents feared that the blogging service’s sale would make it more vulnerable to political pressure from government authorities.
