English

DDoS attacks launched on pro-democratic sites in wake of «silent» protests

“Distributed Denial of Service” (DDoS) attacks have been launched on a number of pro-democratic news sites in the wake of “silent” anti-government protests held across Belarus on Wednesday evening.

Yury Patsyomkin, editor in chief of the news service of the United Pro-democratic Forces, told BelaPAN that its website, udf.by, had been targeted by an attack since 7 p.m. on Wednesday. “Our technicians are not able to cope with the threat, and neither can technicians of our hosting service do this,” he said. “Experts have confirmed that we are flooded with bogus requests from Russian servers. Our site has been paralyzed since the previous evening.”

Mr. Patsyomkin linked the attack with coverage of the silent protests on udf.by.

One site of European Radio of Belarus, euroradio. fm, has been suffering from a DDoS attack since 7:15 p.m. on June 22, Editor-in-Chief Vital Zyblyuk told BelaPAN.

The site is bombarded with data from Russian computers, he said.

“After detecting the attack, our hosting operator blocked access to our site in 15 minutes to wait for its end. But the attack still continues,” said Mr. Zyblyuk.

Another popular pro-opposition news site, charter97.org, has been targeted by a DDoS attack for more than a week.