The website of Russia's leading independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, has been under a continuous Denial of Service attack for over a week. The publication's staff feels it's the work of more than amateur hackers.

Denial of Service attacks involve overloading a server with bogus requests. The attack against novayagazeta.ru started last Tuesday and peaked at an impressive 1.5 million page hits per second. The newspaper's website registers on average some 250,000 visits every week.

Even though the attack decreased in intensity in the upcoming days, it remained too powerful for the server to handle. "We had hacker attacks before but never as strong as this," Sergei Asriyants, Novaya Gazeta's web editor, commented for The Moscow Times.

Novaya Gazeta is well known for criticizing the Russian government and is viewed as a center of opposition. During the past ten years, four journalists working for the newspaper have been assassinated, including renowned Russian human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006.

The origin of the attack could not be established and the reason can only be speculated upon. "Maybe someone just wants to punish us for our overall work," said Novaya Gazeta spokewoman Nadezhda Prusenkova. She also pointed out that a criminal complaint was filed with the authorities, which have yet to respond.

Russian businessman Alexander Lebedev and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev own 49 percent of shares in the newspaper, while the rest is owned by the staff. In January last year, Anastasia Baburova, a Novaya Gazeta journalist, was shot dead together with Stanislav Markelov, a human rights activist and lawyer for the newspaper.