The Russian government blamed liveJournal DDoS attacks and reportedly distributed denial-of-service attacks on the Cyrillic part of the blog portal that began last Wednesday and have been going on

The Russian government blamed the LiveJournal DDoS attack

A distributed denial-of-service attack on the Cyrillic portion of the blog portal reportedly began on Wednesday last week and continued until Tuesday, although other outages have been reported since then.

According to the Moscow Times, hackers in Asia and Eastern Europe used botnet-powered computers to send page requests to LiveJournal servers, paralyzing the site for hours at a time.

"A second wave of attacks took place on Monday, again causing LiveJournal.com to be inaccessible in Russia," the newspaper said, adding that initial speculation suggested the attacks were aimed at individual bloggers, possibly kremlin critics.

"Such incidents have happened before. But LiveJournal management reports that the entire site has become a target," the newspaper noted.

The Moscow Times quoted Ilya Dronov, the development director of the site's owner, SUP, as saying that the attack indiscriminately targeted dozens of top bloggers and communities.

The newspaper pointed to accusations of attacks against the Russian government, with Anton Nosik, a prominent LiveJournal blogger and former director of SUP, writing that a large-scale attack required substantial administrative and financial support.

Meanwhile, staff at security research firm NetCraft have been analyzing the extent of DDoS attacks on LiveJournal, noting that while servers have been upgraded previously to deal with attacks, "it doesn't seem to have stopped the current attack from succeeding." "

Security researcher Paul Mutton quoted Svetlana Ivannikova, Russia's head of LiveJournal, as saying that earlier this week another attack had destroyed the site.

She told NetCraft that administrators were aware of the problem and were trying to determine the source and target of the attack.

Mutton also noted that NetCraft's analysis showed that the attack on LiveJournal dates back to March 2, "but LiveJournal largely withstood the attack until March 30 when it was stepped up." ”