Major DDOS attack on Belarusian Internet

The most ferocious to date attack against the Belarusian Internet was launched on 5 January 2008 against the Belarusian portal TUT.by and its provider HOSTER.BY which is located in Moscow. 

At 17.10 800 megabytes of traffic were directed at the Moscow Internet provider. To understand the scale of the attack, one can say that the power of the entire external Belarusian channel since its recent expansion comes to 3.1 gigabytes.

This attack was deflected some four hours later. However there was a similar attack on another Belarusian provider in 2007.  After a week of the non-stop attack then, a lot of clients left the provider.  There was a small-scale attack on TUT.by  a week ago which was dealt with quickly by the computer specialists.  Presumably the aims of those ordering these attacks were not fulfilled and the attack was stepped up on Saturday.

The method used was once again a DDOS attack, where hundreds or thousands of “zombie-computers” (i.e. those which have been infected by the hackers) inundate the provider with requests, effectively bringing down the whole system which cannot cope with the load.

A number of the businesses using the provider have already reported losses, and a formal report has been issued to the relevant authorities.

There can be various motives for such criminal actions.  Given the recent attacks on sites with no financial interests (i.e. Maidan and ourselves, HRO.org in Russia and others), any attacks which effectively block the flow of information must be followed very closely.

Based on information from www.tut.by