Belarus media sites under attack by zombies

The spectre of politically-motivated hacking attacks has once again risen in Eastern Europe. Media websites in Belarus, in particular news site Charter97.org, are under a distributed denial of service attack. Charter97 has been unavailable for several days and under lower-level attack for much longer, security tools firm Arbor …

[Matt W 1]

The war memorial

This is likely to be a part of the continuing escalation of discontent with the Belarussian govt. Google the row over the war memorial.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tron

Every time I see all these cyberwords it makes me think of hackers shrinking down and getting into my computer Tron-style.

[MondoMan]

correction

The Estonian cyberattacks happened in 2007, not 1997.

[Ramazan]

ethnically Russian region

Since when the Ossetia is "ethnically Russian separatist region"? Did you ever manage to see any ethnic "Russian" (I mean slavic) there?

[Ramazan]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossetia

largely inhabited by the Ossetians, an Iranian people who speak the Ossetian language (an Eastern Iranian language, Indo-European group of languages)

[Throatwobbler Mangrove]

hold on, hold on

You're missing an important point here (or I am missing it in your report): Charter97 is an anti-Lukashenka (Europe's last dictator TM) website that has served as a hub for the Belarusian Human Rights movement. It has previously been hacked (they believe) by Belarusian child porn merchants linked to local law enforcement agencies: http://spring96.org/en/news/12371/

If the Russian state wanted to embarrass Lukashenka, they wouldn't block this website - in fact, quite the opposite. Although it is interesting that this comes at a time when the Russian Federation and Belarus are beefing about money and memorials.