09 August, 2009, 22:57
Some of the biggest websites were affected Thursday by a cyber attack aimed at a single person who used them to criticize Russia’s policy toward Georgia. Russia was blamed immediately. But is the story that simple?The websites on the receiving end of a denial-of-service attack, or DDoS, included such popular social networks as Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google's Blogger and YouTube. Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal were paralyzed for hours.
"We're actively investigating the source of the attacks, and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them, if we can," Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, was quoted as saying by CNET News.
DDoS attack
Distributed denial-of-service attack generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently and may involve saturating the target machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic.Cyxymu was known among other bloggers for his pronounced pro-Georgian position and strong criticism of Russia over its war with Georgia in August 2008. This fact prompted numerous speculations that the recent attack has Russian roots and was a way to silence the Internet activist.
“The ongoing, massively coordinated attacks on Twitter this week appear to have been geopolitical in motivation,” Twitter representatives wrote on a company blog. “However, we don't feel it's appropriate to engage in speculative discussion about these motivations.”
"It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard," said Kelly, echoing his Twitter colleagues.
The blogger himself eagerly supported this version, saying in his blog that he is “sure that the attacks were aimed against him and the Georgian people.”
But is everything in this incident really as straightforward as it seems?
Be silenced… to be heard
The most stunning point about this story is not, perhaps, the cyber attack itself, but the world-wide resonance it is still enjoying. And the main topic of Cyxymu’s blogs seems to be the reason.Indeed, a person who was hardly known to many became famous overnight. With the world’s most influential periodicals having written about and even interviewed him, such as America’s Washington Post and New York Times, Canada’s Daily Mail, Britain’s Guardian, France’s Libération, Spain’s El País, Japan’s Yomiuri and many others – the number of those who heard about Cyxymu and his ideas skyrocketed into the hundreds of millions.
“As far as I can remember, this is the first attack with such a huge media influence, when a person became famous overnight,” Albert Popkov told RT. Popkov is the founder of Russia’s most popular social network Odnoklassniki.ru, which has more than 30 million Russian-speaking users around the world.
Most importantly, the majority will now undoubtedly sympathize with Cуxуmu, since people tend to sympathize with “victims” of mass baiting.
Now, should there be another conflict between Russia and Georgia, the world press will know who to consult with, as Russian blogger Ostap Karmodi sneered on his website.
“Cуxуmu’s opinion on Russia’s policy will now be interesting to the whole world,” the blogger wrote. “The opinion of a person who was the reason to knock out hundreds of millions of Internet accounts always matters.”
Casualties or means of war?
Such an incredible (and quite predictable) outcome to Thursday’s cyber attack raises several questions.Has the pro-Georgian blogger fell victim to information warfare, or is he rather a means by which to demonize Russia with the most powerful weapons of modern warfare – mass media and the Internet? Could it be a test run for a new kind of high-tech PR? And if so, who is behind all this?
Indeed, what was the point in disabling one person’s accounts for a couple of hours, when a far bigger and clearly inevitable consequence of such a deed – the outage of millions and millions of other accounts around the world – would clearly serve the opposite purpose?
“I think we need to wait for investigation results,” Popkov told RT. “But of course this case will draw the attention of Internet professionals, as well as users who want their voice to be heard.”
“As someone who is involved in creating such resources, I can say that this is a dangerous tendency,” the founder of Odnoklassniki.ru added. “We want to avoid all politics and use the resource as it is intended to be used: for entertainment and communication.”
But what if the most straightforward version of silencing Cуxуmu was the actual and the only intention behind this cyber attack?
In his blog, a Moscow-based journalist and one of the founders of the popular Lenta.ru news website, Anton Nosik, dismissed the idea of Russian authorities or some services being directly involved in the attack. Instead, he assumes, it could have been a group of individual hackers who were confident about their own impunity.
“Indeed, why should the government suffer trying to invent some laws against the Internet – as naive Kazakhs and old-fashioned Chinese did – when it has a bunch of ideologically-inclined geeks in its possession, who are ready to knock out any network with or without a signal?” Nosik asked.
If that is the case, then the people who arranged it – whoever they are – did not quite expect it to turn out this huge, as the outcome has clearly served the opposite purpose.
It is hard to say who could have launched the attack, and to establish the truth may take a lot of effort and resources.
“But you can often find a trail,” Albert Popkov noted.
However it turns out, the networks that were caught off guard will hopefully start to pay more attention to the security of their services and become more proactive.
Vitaliy Matveev, RT
