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Georgian blogger Cyxymu blames Russia for cyber attack. Guardian:

The Georgian blogger known as Cyxymu, who was yesterday the victim of a cyber assault that affected hundreds of millions of web users around the world, has blamed the attack on the Kremlin.

...Cyxymu said his real name was Georgy and that he was a 34-year-old economics lecturer. He is an active critic of Moscow's politics in the Caucasus region and was the victim of a similar attack last year that crashed LiveJournal.

He said he was "amazed" when he realised the latest strike on his blog, Sukhumi, war and pain, had seemingly prompted a global online meltdown.

"I didn't expect that it would be an attack on me, I'm not such a famous blogger," he said. "It started when hundreds of thousands of spam emails supposedly from me were sent all over the world suggesting for people to visit one of my blogs. So thousands of people visited it causing it to freeze, and they [LiveJournal] had to block it again. Then the same thing happened with Facebook and Twitter."

Cyxymu's Tweets are usually in the Cyrillic alphabet, but this one's in English: "My twitter is online! Thank you all for support after ciber attack from Russia!"

The method, from the New York Times (Professor Main Target of Assault on Twitter):

Early Thursday, the attackers sent out a wave of spam under the name Cyxymu, which is a Latin transliteration of the Cyrillic name of the capital of Abkhazia, Sukhumi. This technique, a "joe job," is intended to discredit a Web user by making him appear to be the source of a large amount of junk e-mail. "These hackers wanted to make him look responsible for millions of spam e-mails," said Ms. Jones.

The messages contained links to Giorgi's accounts on several social networks and Web sites, including Twitter.

The next leg of the attack, Ms. Jones said, was a distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attack aimed at knocking Giorgi off the Web. The hackers used a botnet, a network of thousands of malware-infected personal computers, to direct huge amounts of junk traffic to Cyxymu's pages on Twitter, LiveJournal, YouTube and Facebook in an attempt to disable them, Ms. Jones said.

The junk messages overwhelmed the services, slowing them, and in the case of Twitter and LiveJournal, shutting them down entirely for a time.

One wag suggested that, in the absence of Twitter, tweeters use Post-It notes to record their thoughts and daily minutia.

 Tags  Cyxymu Facebook Twitter

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