Apparently Russia's President Gets Angry When You Hit His Blog With A Denial Of Service Attack

from the blog-is-down-for-an-hour! dept

Denial of service attacks are a pain, but they happen. In many ways they’re becoming one way that people protest against powerful people and organizations — and some have discussed how many are effectively the equivalent of a digital sit-in. Of course, it’s no fun to be on the receiving end of a DoS attack, and if you’re in a position of power, it isn’t surprising to react angrily to such an attack. But it does seem a little out of proportion for Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to demand that Russian law enforcement officials look into the reason why his LiveJournal blog was taken offline for a whole hour due to a denial of service attack.

“I have received many appeals in connection with the … attacks on LiveJournal. As an active user of (LiveJournal) I consider these actions revolting and illegal…. What has occurred should be examined by LiveJournal’s administration and law enforcement agencies.”

Of course, it does seem a bit strange that he’s only concerned about denial of service attacks when they impact him personally. Also, LiveJournal? Isn’t that kinda like if President Obama had a blog on Blogspot? It’s not that hard these days to have a blog on your own domain…

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Companies: livejournal

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Comments on “Apparently Russia's President Gets Angry When You Hit His Blog With A Denial Of Service Attack”

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21 Comments
Denis V. says:

No need to be so snarky, there's a good reason for this

Last week’s DDoS attacks on livejournal are a hot, and actually very interesting, news topic in Russia. The reason is that the site is considered the most popular – and some would say the only – platform for independent citizen journalism and critique of the government. Since there are presidential elections coming up next year, there’s a reasonable fear among the opposition that the attacks are actually government-based, trying to show that everyone can be silenced, and that livejournal isn’t safe.

Medvedev’s statements are, in fact, an attempt to deny that LJ DDoS has anything to do with the government.

Max says:

Oh, and about these:

> Of course, it does seem a bit strange that he’s only concerned about denial of service attacks when they impact him personally.

I don’t think the president knew what DoS is before receiving news from his aides that Livejournal is, in fact, down 🙂

> Also, LiveJournal? Isn’t that kinda like if President Obama had a blog on Blogspot? It’s not that hard these days to have a blog on your own domain…

This was surely a political decision – “the government supports and promotes IT industry, etc”.

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