Around the Net
Russian Hackers Take Down UStream
- The New York Times, Thursday, May 10, 2012 10:06 AM
Hackers on Wednesday shut down the streaming online video platform uStream for about nine hours, The New York Times reports. The site was being used by Russian activists to stream live video of protestors in Moscow, following the election of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as the next President of the country.
According to uStream’s CEO and Co-Founder, Brad Hunstable, hackers used a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack to flood uStream’s data centers all over the world. A DDoS attack involves thousands of IP addresses repeatedly targeting one or several Web servers, rendering them unable to process all of the requests. In this case, Hunstable said the zombie IP addresses came primarily from Russia, Kazakhstan and Iran. He added that this was the third such coordinated attack from Russia in six months.
“The scale of this thing was absolutely incredible,” Hunstable said. “It was the most complex cyberattack that we have ever seen. This is much more than one cyberattack and one protest. This is fundamental to preserving freedom of speech and assembly on the Internet.”
I'm sorry, but I don't see this as a hacker activity. The average hacker doesn't care about political actions or comments and wouldn't give one whit about streaming protests through the Internet. The Russian government, on the other other hand, would. Considering the size and scope of the attack, what was attacked, and why it was attacked, I can only view this DDoS attack as state-sponsored censorship through terrorist acts.