Hackers blocked access to "Novaya Gazeta"

MOSCOW, 29 January 2010. Editors from the liberal Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta have appealed to the police to investigate a hacker attack that has blocked access to their website, Interfax reports.

 

Nadezhda Prusenkova of the newspaper’s press service said that the DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on Novaya Gazeta’s server has increased in strength since its initiation on Tuesday morning. The site now receives one and a half million hits a second, effectively paralyzing it.

 

Novaya Gazeta is one of the few newspapers in Russia that remains openly critical of the Kremlin. Four of its journalists have been killed since 2001, including Anna Politkovskaya, whose October 2006 murder shocked the world. Novaya Gazeta reporter Anastasia Baburova was shot dead on January 19, 2009 in Moscow, together with lawyer Stanislav Markelov, who was acting on behalf of a family whose daughter was murdered by a Russian officer in Chechnya. “Novaya Gazeta” is frequently sued for defamation. Recently, Josef Stalin’s grandson sued it for an article that reported that Stalin ordered the Katyn Forest massacre.

 

“The editors of Novaya Gazeta consider this attack to be a direct violation of media laws, an impeding the realization of the professional activities of journalists, a violation of the rights of our readers to obtain prompt information and a breakdown of the agreement with our advertisers,” reads a post on the newspaper’s LiveJournal blog, which editors are using to publish material while the website remains inaccessible.

 

Editors of the newspaper suspect that once of the possible motive of the attack could be its recent coverage of controversial house demolitions in the Moscow village of Rechnik. “Our correspondents are on duty in the village around the clock and send the editors photographs and videos, testimony from the victims, and also property ownership documents that still have not appeared in the news,” they said in a blog post.

 

Prusenkova noted that editors are attempting to find an alternative domain for the website in addition to LiveJournal. “But the problem is that the attack immediately goes to the domain name ‘Novaya Gazeta’,” she said.

 

Sources: BBC Russian Service , Interfax