THE GEORGIAN blogger who fell victim to Thursday’s enormous cyber assault that hit LiveJournal, Facebook and Twitter, affecting hundreds of millions of web users around the world, has blamed the Kremlin for the attack.
The blogger – a 34-year-old economics lecturer called Georgy, better known to his online readers as Cyxymu – said he believed the denial-of-service strike was an attempt to silence his criticism of Russia’s conduct in the war over the disputed South Ossetia region, which began a year ago yesterday.
“Maybe it was carried out by ordinary hackers, but I’m certain the order came from the Russian government,” he said from his office in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.
“An attack on such a scale could only be organised by someone with huge resources.”
Georgy – whose moniker is a Latinised version of the Russian spelling of Sukhumi, the capital of Georgia’s other breakaway republic, Abkhazia – has repeatedly condemned Moscow’s policies in the Caucasus. Last year he was the victim of a similar attack that crashed LiveJournal for a day.
But he was “amazed” when he realised the latest strike on his blog, Sukhumi, War and Pain, had apparently triggered a global online meltdown. “I didn’t expect that it would be an attack on me, I’m not such a famous blogger,” he said.
“It started when hundreds of thousands of spam e-mails supposedly from me were sent all over the world suggesting for people to visit one of my blogs. So thousands of people visited it, causing it to freeze, and they [LiveJournal] had to block it again. Then the same thing happened with Facebook and Twitter.”
Georgy said his blog aimed to unite ethnic Georgians who lived in Sukhumi but were forced to leave as refugees in 1993 when Abkhazia seceded from Georgia.
Declining to give his surname, he said he was a Georgian born in Sukhumi who fled the city in September 1993. He is now an economics professor who taught at an institute in Tbilisi for refugees from Abkhazia.
Cyxymu’s original LiveJournal blog was still blocked yesterday and he reported on a back-up blog that it too was coming under a new spam attack. Russian government officials were unavailable for comment yesterday.
Anton Nosik, an internet guru and executive of the Sup company which owns LiveJournal in Russia, wrote in his blog that Kremlin-protected hackers appeared to be responsible. – (Guardian service)