techForum: Pro-Georgian blogger is targeted

Posted by pchelptech at 10:03 p.m. | Friday, August 07, 2009

Cyxymu, a Georgian who has blogged extensively on the Russo-Georgia conflict and the land grab of South Ossetia was apparently targeted in a DoS attack lasting around two hours yesterday.

His Live Journal blog (which I won't link to), Facebook page and Twitter profile were hit hard, probably by a botnet set up to silence him.

The side effect of the DoS attack was that Live Journal, Facebook and Twitter were heavily affected, with Live Journal an Twitter being brought down, unable to handle the millions of requests, while Facebook performance was greatly reduced. Google and YouTube were also targeted, but their architecture greatly limits the effects of such DoS attacks, so they were able to absorb most of the impact and no end users were impacted.

It is not yet known who was responsible, although there was the suggestion (from Cyxymu himself) that the Russian authorities were involved. There is more evidence that an individual or a small group was responsible, leveraging the power of hacked PCs (known as zombies) around the world to stage what is quite a traditional type of denial of service attack - flooding target pages with a very high and volume of requests, sustained for long enough to bring down the site or service serving the page.

Cyxymu's Live Journal blog is still offline - presumably as a precautionary measure from Microsoft, to spare other users from further outages. Understandable, if a bit cowardly.

Whether the KGB was behind this, as some suspect, or if it was a disgruntled diametrically opposed (in the political sense) hacker or group of hackers remains to be seen. It is unlikely that this is the last we will hear of it.