Freedom of Speech – Attack of Russian Blogging Platform LiveJournal.com
As of today, LiveJournal.com, one of the oldest free online blogging platforms similar to WordPress.com and Tumblr.com, appears to be up and running smoothly; at least from a general user and viewer’s perspective. But the blogging site that’s reported to host more than 30 million accounts that cumulatively captures an audience of 16 million readers (about 50% of them being Russian) has been under attack more than once over the past few months, with the most recent DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack being reported last week and another major attack reported at the end of March into the first of April of this year.
The initial major DDoS attack against LiveJournal at the end of March into April appeared to allegedly be against those blogs that are critical of the government, namely Russian political activist Alexey Navalny who tends to share content that highlights corruption amongst Russian politicians and as a result tends to rub some influential people the wrong way.
The DDoS attack reported last week resulted with an unexplained outage beginning on Tuesday, July 26th, with a statement being released on the company’s status page the following day, Wednesday, July 27th, that explained:
“We can now publicly disclose that we have been experiencing a large-scale DDoS attack the last two days, which has been the reason for the site issues most users have been experiencing. The traffic load has been immense, at many times our normal load level, and the attack is still on-going. We are in constant contact with our providers to mitigate the attack as best as possible. We again apologize for the disruption to LiveJournal usage, and are working to get everything back to normal as soon as we can. Thank you!”
By Thursday, July 28th, the blog was up and running again.
Conspiracy theories abound as there’s still speculation as to who’s truly behind the attacks. And given that the investigation is ongoing, users may experience further interruptions in the near future.
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