LiveJournal under attack

I don’t have a LiveJournal account, but sometimes I’ll have a quick read of the blogs during breaks. On 4 April, however, an official announcement by LiveJournal Russia stated that the service had been subjected to a DDoS and was unavailable.

This massive DDoS attack is the second to target LiveJournal over the last few days. Russia’s online mass media is currently awash with rumors and speculation about the reasons and aims of the attacks.

We don’t know exactly how many botnets took part in the latest attack but we definitely know of one botnet that was involved. It is based on the Optima/Darkness DDoS bot that is currently popular on the Russian-speaking cybercrime black market. Not only are the Trojan programs (bots) themselves on sale, but also infected computer networks that are built with the help of such programs and services offering to carry out DDoS attacks on any given Internet resource.

We have been monitoring one of these Optima botnets for some time now.

Analysis of the data acquired showed that the first DDoS attack on LiveJournal occurred on 24 March. The botnet’s owners gave the command to launch an attack on the blog address of the renowned anti-corruption figure Alexey Navalny: http://navalny.livejournal.com. On 26 March, the bots received commands to attack another resource belonging to Navalny: http://rospil.info, and on 1 April, http://www.rutoplivo.ru, another site with a political slant, was targeted.

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