DDoS cyberattack on LiveJournal enrages Russian president

A cyberattack on blogging platform and social networking site LiveJournal this week has earned the ire of no less than Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who is an active blogger there. Medvedev called for a full investigation by LiveJournal administration and law enforcement agencies into the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that disrupted the platform's services. "Received many complaints in connection with DDoS-attacks on LiveJournal. As an active user of LJ (I) believe these actions are outrageous and illegal," he said in an entry on his blog, as translated by Google. "What has occurred should be examined by LiveJournal's administration and law enforcement agencies," he added, according to a separate translation by the BBC. The BBC quoted Alexander Gostev of Kaspersky Labs as telling Moscow Echo radio that the attack was coming from thousands of infected computers in China, the US and Western Europe. Also, the BBC said that Sup Media, the owner of LiveJournal, was "delighted" that Medvedev had "criticised the recent hacker attacks in the strongest terms". Sup Media described Medvedev as "an enthusiastic blogger on LiveJournal for the past two years." For its part, LiveJournal said that it had been the victim of repeated, large-scale DDoS attacks over the last two weeks. "These attacks are against multiple journals worldwide, several of which are political in nature," it said. LiveJournal also underscored its strong belief in the ideal of freedom of expression, "and we're working very hard to ensure that users around the world have a place where their voices can be heard." Citing its traffic analysis data, LiveJournal said that most of the attacks are coming from entire networks in the same subnets, suggesting participation by multiple network operators. "We have made significant changes to our systems and processes to battle attacks of this nature and are continuing to adjust to each new attack as quickly as we can. We share your frustration in not being able to access LiveJournal during these attacks —please know that we're doing everything within our power to get this behind us," it said. — TJD, GMA News