26 October 2007, 05:11
Russian human rights website faces DDOS attack
The website Human Rights in Russia at www.hro.org has become the victim of a major DDoS attack. This Distributed Denial of Service assault is a notorious means of closing access to a site by effectively inundating it with a huge number of requests. The site's system becomes overloaded, and therefore doesn't open when Internet users try to access it.
The attack was first noted around 21.30 on 21 October. The assault is ferocious with around 200 requests a second.
As of 16.00 (in Ukraine) on 23 October, the attack has not abated, and all attempts are being made to overcome the problem. The people at www.hro.org extend their apologies to all their readers. It would be difficult to attribute this to some chance hacker.
As we did when certain Belarusian websites faced such an attack during the elections for President, we will be following what happens, and will endeavour to pass on their material should this continue.
Such attacks are an outrage and we must be united in fighting them.
Andrei Blinushov