July 17th, 2007
Kremlin accused of cyberwarfare against media, opposition, even US
While it could never be proved, many observers thought the cyberattacks on Estonia were the handiwork of the Kremlin. If so, it appears Moscow is now aiming cyberwarfare at Russia’s opposition parties and independent media, the AP reports.
“A huge information war awaits Russia before the elections,” said Oleg Panfilov of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations. The groups claim the attackers use vast, online networks of computers infected with malicious software — whose owners probably aren’t aware they are involved — to paralyze or erase targeted Web sites.
According to one well-connected analyst, a senior counselor of Putin is in charge of cyberwarfare. The Kremlin denies the charges and says hackers are spoofing Kremlin IP addresses.
Stanislav Belkovsky, founder of the National Strategy Institute, said the Kremlin is trying to control the content of online media. “The Kremlin can’t just tell their editors to remove an unwanted publication,” he said. So, Moscow is attempting to shut down the sites by force.
The Russian political attacks bear the same fingerprints as the cyberwarfare against Estonia — a distributed denial of service attack that brought down dozens of government and corporate Web sites.
In Russia, media and opposition politicians have relied on the Web as an avenue that the Kremlin couldn’t censor.
But reliance on the Web also makes the opposition vulnerable to hackers.
The outlawed National Bolshevik party says its Web sites were repeatedly hacked between February and April. … The attacks were sophisticated as well as massive, said Alexei Sochnev, who is in charge of the National Bolsheviks’ online network.“They killed the entire U.S. server that hosted us,” he said.
The major daily newspaper Kommersant was attacked in May in retaliation, Web editor Pavel Chernikov said, publishing a transcript of the interrogation of Boris Berezovsky — a self-exiled oligarch who lives in London — by Russian investigators. That very same May morning, the Web site of Ekho Moskvy, a liberal Moscow radio station, was brought down by a DDoS attack.
And while U.S. government agencies suffer a barage of DDOS attacks - almost half of all DDOS attacks are targeted at the U.S., according to Symantec - Russian government agencies have no such problem, the AP says.
