Russian Hackers Behind DDos Attacks
Just about one year after the Georgia-Russia war started, Twitter suffered about three hours of down time on early Thu.
while Facebook and LiveJournal also suffered short lived outages. Though it has still not been confirmed who is behind the assault, Facebook told UK’s Guardian and BBC Reports that it believes the Russian presidency ordered the assault.
Facebook informed the UK media outlets the attack was targeted at a pro-Georgian activist blogger known as Cyxymu, who had formerly criticised Russia for the way it handled the war over the South Ossetia area. The social network site also issued a statement that expounded the assault on Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal, where Cyxymu had accounts, “appears to be aimed at an individual who has a presence on a number of sites, instead of the sites themselves” and was intended “to keep his voice from being heard”.
Search engine Google was also a major target of the DDos attack, but managed to avoid any service interruptions. The company expounded in a press release that its “systems stopped indisputable impact to [its] services”. Google failed to designate which services were centered, but many believe the company’s Gmail and YouTube services were attacked.
This isn’t the first time that anti-Georgia Russian hackers have employed the Web to get their message out. Last July, pro-Russian hackers defaced more than three hundred Lithuanian sites with the banned hammer and sickle and the five-pointed star symbols, as well as profane messages.
