Cyber attack spreads to Russian newspaper

The sporadic DDoS attack on LiveJournal, Russia’s most popular blogging platform, continues. On Friday, the website of opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta was also inaccessible. “Novaya Gazeta has undergone a DDoS attack,” tweeted Alexander Lebedev, the oligarch who part owns the paper. “Judging by everything, it’s being attacked by the same bots that are attacking LiveJournal.”

At Time.com, Simon Shuster explores the reasons for the attack. “Instead of the focused assaults hackers often used to force down the websites of their ideological enemies, these attacks look more like online carpet bombing,” he writes. “[T]he motive, as close as experts have been able to figure, is to erode the virtual infrastructure of free speech itself.”

A few Russian bloggers protested outside the offices of LiveJournal owner SUP today, hoping to push the company to better deal with the problem. Looks like that won’t happen. Even Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s blogging president, has called for the “LiveJournal administrators and the security services” to look into the cause of the attack. “As an active LiveJournal user, I consider these actions shocking and illegal,” he wrote in his blog Thursday. All for naught: a security service source told Interfax on Friday that the security services are incapable of dealing with the attack since the bots carrying out the distributed denial of service attack are located outside Russia’s borders, on a US server.