Cyber-attacks ‘aimed at Georgia blogger’
By Joseph Menn and David Gelles in San Francisco
Published: August 7 2009 20:17 | Last updated: August 7 2009 23:21
The cyber-attacks that felled the internet messaging service Twitter and blogging platform LiveJournal this week were apparently aimed at silencing a single person who had been posting comments critical of Russian activity in the country of Georgia, another victimised company and outside security experts said on Friday.
The critic had a Facebook user name of Cyxymu Livejournal, and posted elsewhere with variations of the name, according to Facebook, the social networking website that was also attacked and slowed but not brought down. He had a blogging account on Google as well, which was a fourth company slowed by the massive assault.
At least in Facebook’s case, the denial-of-service attack – in which thousands of computers attempt simultaneous connections, slowing the target site’s response to a near standstill – was aimed at the one user’s page, the company said.
“Yesterday’s attack appears to be directed at an individual who has a presence on a number of sites, rather than the sites themselves,” Facebook said in a written statement.
“Specifically, the person is an activist blogger, and a botnet [a network of personal computers compromised with viruses or other means] was directed to request his pages at such a rate that it impacted service for other users.”
If the theory is correct, it would be an expansion in cyber-attacks against private critics of the Kremlin. In the past, allies of the Russian government have used denial-of-service attacks against government sites in Georgia and Estonia, as well as media sites in eastern Europe that support opponents of the Russian government. No one in those attacks has been definitively identified, but an official with a Kremlin-supported youth group has claimed credit for the Estonia attack in 2007.
Facebook said it was working with unspecified federal authorities on the case. An FBI spokesman would not confirm or deny an investigation. Researchers who spoke to US officials said the case did not appear to be a high priority, but said intelligence agencies were interested in the geopolitical aspect.
Twitter and LiveJournal went down for hours on Thursday, inconveniencing millions of users, after thousands of computers in a botnet kept trying to connect to the sites. Twitter remained slow on Friday, the first anniversary of the Russia-Georgia war.
On Friday the suspected target’s Twitter account was back up. In one post, he claimed: “This hackers was from Russian KGB.”
But Dmitri Alperovitch, a researcher at antivirus company McAfee, said the user’s commentary was too mild to merit a state-sponsored attack.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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