Targeted Twitter user blames Russia
The Georgian blogger whose Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts were targeted in denial-of-service attacks on Thursday, says he thinks Russia's federal security service is behind it.
"This hackers was from Russian KGB," the blogger, who uses "Cyxymu" on his accounts, wrote in a tweet early on Friday, adding later: "My twitter is online! Thank you all for support after ciber attack from Russia!"
Because of the difficulty in tracing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks back to the source, unless someone takes credit for the attack or brags about it to online associates, it's nearly impossible to determine exactly who was responsible.
Cyxymu is identified as a 34-year-old economics lecturer named Georgy from Tblisi, Georgia, by The Guardian. His blog postings are critical of Russia's dealings with the Caucasus region and his screen name is a Latinized version of the spelling of Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, a breakaway Georgian republic.
"Maybe it was carried out by ordinary hackers but I'm certain the order came from the Russian government," he is quoted as saying. His LiveJournal account was attacked last year, as well, according to the report.
The DDoS attacks came on the eve of the one-year anniversary of a significant military clash between Russia and Georgia, which have had an ongoing conflict. In the 2008 South Ossetia war that began on August 7, 2008, Georgia attempted to retake control of South Ossetia and Russia launched air strikes against Georgia.
"When the war started in South Ossetia last year I couldn't avoid being drawn into politics," the blogger said.
The Georgian government is investigating potential links between its citizen and the attacks, and there are suspicions that the attack came from Russia, Shota Utiashvili, head of the Department of Information and Analysis at the Ministry of the Interior, told CNN.
Twitter was down for hours on Thursday during the attack, and LiveJournal suffered an outage. Facebook, and Google--whose Blogger, Google Sites, and YouTube were also affected--were able to fend it off.
Whoever was behind the attack may also be responsible for a spam e-mail campaign launched before the DDoS attack and targeting the blogger's accounts. In that attack e-mails were sent out that looked like they came from the blogger and included hyperlinks to his accounts on the targeted sites. A Facebook spokesman and others said that a spam attack would not have been effective enough to cause a DoS outage.
On his Blogger account the Georgian posted a copy of a Russian language news article in which he himself says the spam attack did not cause the DDoS attacks.
The Cyxymu accounts were back up on Friday on Twitter and Facebook (where he's a fan of John McCain), but his LiveJournal account appeared to still be inaccessible though a cached version was available on Google. His YouTube account, meanwhile, never went down.
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor. 
that illusion about angry russians disappeared more then 20 years ago, but still there are idiots who will believe him...
I'll say what I said before in my previous post in such theme:
" A friend of mine was at that war, when georgia attacked south osetia , he've made some photos, wrote an article but it wasn't published in US 'cos "Mr.Somebody" didn't want that to happen. And what do you think is next? He have found his photos on many sites and have seen them on TV as approval that russia brought out the war. SO *** IS THIS??? DEMOCRACY??
Our politics are playing in silly games, they feed us **** and want us to belive in everything they say.
It'll be an year after that war, and georgia wants us ( western world) again to believe in that ******* **** they've made.
South osetia was a part of georgia and, georgia's goverment decided to return them by force, of course with help of US , because they said that it was war for the democracy... oh yeah???
They crushed people by tanks for the democracy? bunch of ******* politics wants us to obey them, so ******* them all, if you want to know the truth you have to go there and ask people how it was. "
"Motivation = buzzword. twitter ddos seems targeted, but for this PR, maybe the guy even attacked himself."
http://twitter.com/gadievron/status/3183325793
What does happen, quite often, is groups of Russians act independently to cause mischief...some kind of mistaken notion of patriotism.
But lets not blame the Russians too much. This economics professor knows full well the KGB doesn't exist, and he 'sure' of things that in truth, he knows the opposite is true.
He just has thing very strong belief that Americans are stupid and easily manipulated.
Its so laughable, that this american is offended.
Whether we will support Georgia or not, will be based on our interests, and our interests alone... in truth, I don't happen to believe in the Bush administrations idea, that Georgia was any type of big deal.
Just a bunch of hicks in the sticks.
I do not think they(Russians) are certain of his location, and if he IS in Georgia (no longer part of Russia) , the reach of the KGB or current incarnation is not what it once was.
KGB, roflmao! Try wisiting history lessons at normal school...
- by whitedove_iwj August 11, 2009 1:23 PM PDT
- If someone like this is so malicous...their account should be closed and banned from using the internet altogether. Words may hurt someone's feelings, but creating such a problem online enough to possibly start another war...someone had to do the right thing...
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(19 Comments)