Vladimir Putin's Cyber Warriors
The Kremlin's Ham-handed Effort to Squelch Online Dissent
Article Summary and Author Biography
In the wake of Sunday's contested parliamentary elections, the Russian security services have made obvious and clumsy efforts to shut down independent news sources. But controlling information online will prove impossible, and continued attempts to do so will only backfire.
ANDREI SOLDATOV is the co-founder of the Web site Agentura.ru. He is the author, with Irina Borogan, of The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB.
Snapshot
With its entrenched advantages, the Kremlin's United Russia party should be safe for now -- but if Vladimir Putin doesn't acknowledge the widespread dissatisfaction with his rule, he may soon find that force is the only way to preserve his regime.
Early on Tuesday morning, my Web site, Agentura.ru, which covers the activities of Russia's secret services, was shut down by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. My technical staff and I were forced to reset the site's server every 15 minutes, but it didn't help: the site was down for the most of the day.
This came later than I expected: many independent Russian news and analysis Web sites faced attacks and disruptions on Sunday, the day of Russia's parliamentary elections, in which the party favored by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, United Russia, suffered an embarrassing setback at the polls, even after engaging in widespread voting fraud.
In total, 14 sites were victims of DDoS attacks, including those of the radio station Ekho Moskvy, the newspaper Kommersant, and Golos, the country's only independent election watchdog. Those Web sites were attacked as early as 6:40 on Sunday morning, according to Alexei Venediktov, Ekho Moskvy's editor-in-chief, and remained offline for the entire day. According to information-security experts at Yandex, Russia's largest search portal, more than 200,000 computers were turned into "slaves" for the DDoS attack, in which a targeted site receives so many requests for access that it simply shuts down. It is a simple, cheap, and effective way to disrupt a Web site, at least temporarily.
The attacked sites responded by migrating elsewhere. For example, the news portal Slon.ru and the Web site of the newspaper Bolshoi Gorod moved their content to the Web site of the television channel Dozhd. For their part, Ekho Moskvy and Golos used blogs on LiveJournal.com; when LiveJournal later came under attack, Golos switched to Google Docs to publish its data on electoral violations...
