14 DAY TRIAL // Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev has condemned the recent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against blog publishing platform LiveJournal, calling them outrageous and illegal.
President Medvedev maintains a personal blog on LiveJournal since April 2009, a few months after the entire site's development moved to Russia.
LiveJournal is very popular with Russian bloggers, much more so than WordPress.com or Google's Blogger, services favored in the rest of the world.
Since the second half of last month, LiveJournal has been hit repeatedly by DDoS attacks for reasons not yet entirely clear.
Security vendor Kaspersky Lab has monitored these attacks and noticed that at first they targeted the blog of renowned Russian political activist and corruption critic Alexey Navalny.
However, the targets later diversified and included some of the most popular blogs on the platform without any political connection, raising more questions about what is actually intended.
Yesterday, President Medvedev revealed that he received many complaints regarding the DDoS attacks against LiveJournal.
"As an active LJ user I believe these actions are outrageous and illegal. This should be sorted out by LiveJournal's administration and law enforcement agencies," Medvedev wrote on his blog. [Google translation]
When previously asked about the attacks, LiveJournal said it hadn't yet notified authorities. "We haven’t approached the Russian law enforcement authorities with a request to start legal proceedings but we don’t exclude a lawsuit option," Svetlana Ivannikova, head of LiveJournal Russia, told Kaspersky Lab.
It remains to be seen if President Medvedev's comments encourages the company to file a complaint, because as Kaspersky's Maria Garnaeva points out, these attacks are a violation of Article 273 of the Russian Criminal Code which deals with the creation, use, and dissemination of harmful computer viruses. The attacks are instrumented with botnets based on the Optima malware.