If the hacker attacks that hit Russia’s top blogging service, LiveJournal, this week are anything to go by, the unwritten rules of cyber warfare no longer apply. Instead of the focused assaults hackers often used to force down the websites of their ideological enemies, these attacks look more like online carpet bombing. Their victim is not one voice but the entire cacophonous world of the Russian blogosphere. And the motive, as close as experts have been able to figure, is to erode the virtual infrastructure of free speech itself.
The scope of the attack on LiveJournal wasn’t clear when the first wave struck in the last week of March, sometimes slowing sites down to a crawl, other times knocking them offline altogether. At first the assault seemed narrowly political in nature, targeting the sites of just one anti-corruption crusader and blogger, Alexei Navalny, who has long been a thorn in the government’s side. Most famously, he once dubbed United Russia, the ruling party of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, “the party of swindlers and thieves” — a moniker the party has since been frantically trying to shake.
It was easy, therefore, for Navalny and other opposition bloggers to conclude that the hackers were aligned with the government. There have been many precedents to back up the theory. In 2007, when the Russian government had a diplomatic spat with Estonia, hackers sympathetic to the Russian cause shut down the websites of Estonia’s banking system and its government. In August 2008, when Russia was at war with Georgia, Georgian government websites were crippled by hackers, and a year later, a Georgian blogger who wrote on LiveJournal with an anti-Russian slant was hit with attacks so massive they briefly shut down Facebook and Twitter, where the blogger also had accounts.
But easy as it was to blame the Kremlin for all these ideological attacks, it was just as easy for the Kremlin’s defenders to point out that hackers who mount such attacks can do so whenever they please, at very little cost and without getting orders from anyone. It’s easy to imagine a brigade of nationalist hackers who share the Kremlin’s ideology and launch an attack out of a sense of patriotism. This was widely believed to be the case with Estonia, even among independent experts who studied those attacks.
