Internet & Democracy Blog

The fiercely independent Novaya Gazeta has been under a sustained DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack for the last week. Many have speculated that the site came under attack because of a story last week on corruption by Yulia Latynina, but the deputy editor of the paper told the Sydney Morning Herald that the paper had “many friends” who might like to see the paper at least temporarily inaccessible. The new Russian version of Herdict, called Nardict, Berkman’s distributed Web filtering reporting tool, confirms that the site is still inaccessible around the world and in Russia.

While the Russian government doesn’t actively filter the Internet, it does shut down extremist content, and, as the Moscow Times notes, the government is suspected of supporting similar DDOS attacks against targets in Georgia and Ukraine, while the leader of a pro-Kremlin youth group admitted to orchestrating DDOS attacks against Estonian government and banking sites in 2007.

Although the attacks have weakened from a high of 1.5 million hits a second last Thursday, the paper’s servers remain overwhelmed. However, the newspaper’s stories continue to appear on its LiveJournal blog. The editors wrote on the blog that:

We understand that the purpose of a hacker attack was undoubtedly to hamper the free flow of information across the network.

We also believe that the network nature of the Internet is always stronger than any attacker, any botnet, or any DDoS-attacks.

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