On the morning of yesterday's Duma elections, several major news outlets in Russia suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Websites belonging to Ekho Moskvy, Kommersant, Slon.ru, and the journal, New Times, were disabled. The site of Golos, an independent Russian election observation organization that had famously published a crowd-sourced map of election violations, was also hacked.
Aleksei Venediktov, Chief Editor of Ekho Moskvy, spoke with RFE/RL's Russian language service about the attack.
According to Venediktov, the DDoS attack on Ekho Moskvy and other media outlets began at 6:40 on the morning of elections. "I attribute this directly to the fact that the website Ekho Moskvy, which had 2 million visits daily over the last month, published a record of violations relating to the Duma elections. And the people who commit these violations either facilitated or organized the DDos attacks in order to prevent information about their illegal activities from circulating" he said.
Click here for the full interview in Russian.
Aleksei Venediktov, Chief Editor of Ekho Moskvy, spoke with RFE/RL's Russian language service about the attack.
According to Venediktov, the DDoS attack on Ekho Moskvy and other media outlets began at 6:40 on the morning of elections. "I attribute this directly to the fact that the website Ekho Moskvy, which had 2 million visits daily over the last month, published a record of violations relating to the Duma elections. And the people who commit these violations either facilitated or organized the DDos attacks in order to prevent information about their illegal activities from circulating" he said.
Click here for the full interview in Russian.