Translated material
Dead magazine
What is behind DDOS attacks on Livejournal
Dead magazine. The next collapse of a living magazine - and bloggers thought about moving to other platforms. What is behind the clinical death of Livejournal and what are the alternatives of the most promoted Runet blog-site-the New Times understood
The audience of the new social network Google+ exceeded 25 million users in less than a month of work, the company said on August 3. To achieve similar indicators, Google+ competitors needed much more time: Myspace collected 25 million accounts of the year and 9 months, Twitter - 2.5 years, Facebook - for more than three years. There are still few Russian users: 6.4 million accounts on Google+ have been instituted in the United States, in second place India with 3.6 million users, followed by the UK, Germany, Brazil and France. However, it was the Google+ site that many Russian bloggers began to be considered as the main alternative to LJ, after July 25, Livejournal was not available for users for several days.
Dangerous site
Anton Nosik specialist on the Internet on one of the meetings with students told how, back in 1999, Vladimir Putin promised what to do the Internet by an intranet (that is, closed to the world, such as in a cube or in the DPRK.-The New Times) is not going to: “To be one of the eight that the Internet forbade it, it would not be pleased. He said: "In Russia, there will be neither the Chinese model of the Internet, nor even Vietnamese." Then there were 1 million 200 thousand in the Russian Internet, then it was not only a threat, but it was not visible on the radar. Since then, the Internet has changed a lot. ” Putin, most likely, then regretted his words more than once - for him the network, as he himself said, such a large garbage dump. But the trouble is for the authorities - in the fact that in recent years, bloggers have learned to influence the offline situation. The main bridgeheads were social networks - public (Livejournal and Twitter) and non -public (leprosorium.ru).
The heyday of a living magazine fell exactly at the end of the second term of Putin, when political debates left the LiveJournal to Offline - they were now in the popular lawyer Alexei Navalny. Here the genre of collective letters blossomed - votes gathered through a live magazine in support of Svetlana Bakhmina and Vasily Aleksanyan. In the LiveJournal, the “Society of the Blue Vederes” arose, from it we learned about the “War” group, the Rospil website also arose here.
It is now difficult to say whether it was part of the operation to destroy the blog site to buy a living magazine at the end of 2007 by the international company SUP Media, owned by billionaire Alexander Mamut and American Andrew Polson, who immediately departed from the direct management of the company. But it was at that time that the fighting unfolded both against individual bloggers and against the entire service. The top-rating of blogs in Yandex was closed, through which certain messages of a political and social nature were brought to the widespread reader. Hackers who destroyed the magazines of oppositional users began to operate. Bots appeared-commentators-robots, the task of which was the breeding of “garbage dumps” in the comments on the records of bloggers-“truths”. The main oneh room was DDOS attacks.
Virtual trenches
For the first time, “bomb” LJ in a large way began in April 2011. Then the administration of a living magazine quickly reacted to the actions of the attackers-took a number of actions to increase the stability of the hosting platform, and sent an appeal to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. On July 25, the attack was repeated, and the service “lay down” for several days. According to the technical administrator of a living magazine, the summer DDOS broke all records and reached 8 gigabits per second. This is cool not only for LJ - the attacks of such power today are able to carry out without straining, except that Chinese hackers working on their government, and fighting them is incredibly difficult. For an operation of such a scale, not an army of botnets (infected machines under the control of one person), but a small platoon of DDOS'eres are needed. “I do not believe that someone is so hated by someone that this“ someone ”is ready to spend significant funds on the development and implementation of a“ ambitious ”and invisible attack,” writes a graduate of the FSB Academy and a fighter with viruses Evgeny Kaspersky. Regarding the waste of significant funds, Kaspersky is cunning. If we assume that the attacks on blogging in one way or another are authorized by the authorities, we can safely say that they cost them free of charge. DDOS has long become a tool to combat competitors on the Internet1, and DDOS services are offered in advertising ads of numerous hacker forums. The administration of these forums cooperates with the competent authorities, so it is not difficult to “go out” to a specialist in a hacker attack for cyber -drifts. Anonymously hackers tell how they make proposals to participate in the DDOS attacks: either sit in bars under the articles of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation 272, 273 or calmly engage in criminal business, from time to time providing their patrons with the attacks on attacks on certain sites. It is enough to recall the multi -day collapse of the servers of the Kommersant Publishing House, the Party of the ATP and the state sites of Georgia during the South Ossetian conflict.
However, the situation with July attacks on LJ is somewhat more complicated. SUP Director Ilya Dronov said that due to that attack, at least 5 hours, the data center of companies serving the servers Livejournal lay down for at least 5 hours. Hosting blogs is located at the technical sites of American companies Verizon and Qwest. However, The New Times could not find any references to the problems of Verizon or QWest networks in either blogs of these companies or professional forums. “Super-minute cyber-atak, for two days, disabled Verizon and Qwest, is not an ordinary event for the American Internet industry,” Drozov and Anton Nosik doubted. - One could expect at least publications in the American industry media; messages on the websites of Verizon and Qwest; Verizon and Qwest appeals to US law enforcement agencies. ” The New Times also contacted Verizon and Qwest, the answer: companies are not known about DDOS attacks.
Cisco Systems business development manager Alexei Lukatsky in an interview with The New Times put forward three versions of the collapse of Livejournal: the weak security of the service, which could not withstand a random hacker attack; the machinations of competitors; The desire of the authorities on the eve of the start of the Duma campaign to learn to disconnect the promoted discussion site. Well, plus dissatisfaction with the history of the involvement of the functionaries of “United Russia” in interethnic clashes in the village of Sagra, which was promoted by Evgeny Roizman through his LiveJournal. The writer Boris Akunin does not doubt the political background of the attack.
Alternatives 
DDOS ATAKA-a type of hacker attack on a network or a specific server,
in which hundreds of thousands of infected computers and servers connected to the Internet begin to constantly upload a specific IP address or domain name-for example, the address of a living journal of a particular user or IP of one of the key servers Livejournal. Hosting servers and networks on which the attacked portal is located do not withstand a huge number of parasitic requests and temporarily disconnected. According to representatives of the criminal cyber market, a medium-level DDOS attack can cost the customer several thousand dollars per day. DDOS'Ers can be held accountable under Article 272 of the Criminal Code - unlawful access to computer information, article 273 - the creation, use and distribution of malicious computer programs, and article 274 - violation of the rules of computers.
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