Russian government accused of cyber attack
A massive cyber assault on dozens of different websites has been blamed on the Russian government.
A Georgian blogger, believed to be the focus of the attack, condemned the Kremlin for a strike which disrupted service to Twitter, Facebook,
LiveJournal and Google.
The blogger, a 34-year-old university lecturer in Georgia, believes the attack to be in response to his criticism of the 2008 Russian-Georgia war.
He said: “Maybe it was carried out by ordinary hackers but I’m certain the order came from the Russian government. An attack on such a scale that affected three worldwide services with numerous servers could only be organised by someone with huge resources.”
The assault – caused by a denial of service attack – saw a number of sites shut down after millions of remote-controlled virus-infected PCs logged on simultaneously.
Blogger previously targeted
The blogger said he had been the subject of denial of service attacks before. Explaining the attack, he commented:
“It started when hundreds of thousands of spam emails, supposedly from me were sent all over the world suggesting for people to visit one of my blogs. So thousands of people visited it causing it to freeze, and they [LiveJournal] had to block it again. Then the same thing happened with Facebook and Twitter.”
Facebook’s chief security officer, Max Kelly, confirmed the attack was aimed at the blogger.
“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard,” he said.
