BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS
DATE:
02/05/2008
DDoS attacks hit Radio Free Europe on Chernobyl anniversary
By Joel Hruska
Earlier this week, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) was hit by a DDoS attack in what Director Alyaksandr Lukashuk described in an interview as the "worst attack that has ever happened on the Belarus site and, as far as I know, on RFE/RL in general." The hackers disabled RFE sites serving South Slavic, Kosovo, Radio Farda, Azerbaijan, Tajik, Tatar-Bashkir, and Russian readers, but the primary target of the assault was the Belarus RFE/RL portal.
The timing of the attack was no accident. April 26 marked the 22nd anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, an event that holds the dubious distinction of being the worst nuclear power plant disaster in human history. Death tolls are impossible to estimate-official UN figures put the number killed at just 4,000, while the Ukranian government claims over 25,000 Ukranians died during the initial struggle for containment and in the construction of the sarcophagus under which the remains of Reactor No. 4 currently rest.
The disaster fundamentally shifted the attitude of many eastern Europeans towards nuclear power, particularly in nations that suffered fallout and contamination. This year's anniversary promised to be a bit more combative than usual. Anti-nuclear activists scheduled a protest march for April 26 as a means of opposing the Belarussian government's plan to build the country's first nuclear reactor. Radio Free Europe sent correspondants to cover the march, only to find itself cut off from them as the DDoS attack ramped to full strength.
The RFE/RL, by all accounts, took the sudden loss of its websites in stride. On-scene correspondants reported in by telephone and stories were recorded and broadcast via shortwave, along with announcements to tune in to Radio Free Europe by radio instead of searching online. On April 28, RFE/RL appealed to fellow journalists and the internet community for help, asking them to spread the word on what had happened to the organization and to carry the RFE's coverage of the April 26 protest. According to Radio Free Europe, the response was enormous; over 30 news organizations pitched in to notify readers and supporters of what had happened.
This is not the first time we've seen these type of attacks. A Chinese group calling itself HackCNN threatened to launch a DDoS attack against the news giant last week, based on its coverage of China's Tibet crackdown, while a disgruntled Estonian hacker's defacement of a government website last January resulted in a temporary cooling of relations between Russia and Estonia.
The prevalence of such attacks is rising, but their effectiveness is dubious, at best. If the purpose of this attack was to stifle coverage of the protest march, it backfired rather stupendously. With 30 independent news sources reporting on both RFE/RL's coverage and the attack against RFE/RL itself, the news may well have reached far more people than Radio Free Europe's coverage alone would have done. These sorts of actions, whether actually sanctioned (unofficially) by the government or not, are sure to incense Belarussian supporters of a free press as well as members of the anti-nuclear movement. Taking down a website may be easy, but stifling its coverage is another matter.
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