U.S.-Belarus row escalates after cyberattack, expulsions

WASHINGTON, May 2 (UPI) -- The U.S. State Department said Thursday it had not yet decided what action, if any, it would take in response to the Belarusian expulsion of U.S. diplomats this week.

The expulsions are the latest step in an escalating confrontation between Washington and Minsk following the imposition last December of U.S. sanctions against a state-owned energy conglomerate. They came on the heels of a cyberattack on the Belarusian site of U.S.-supported broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which State Department officials blamed on the regime.

The expulsions reduced the size of the U.S. diplomatic staff in Minsk to four, department spokesman Tom Casey told reporters.

"We have told (Belarusian officials) that we have very serious concerns about this step that they have taken, and that means we need to think very carefully about our future and their future diplomatic presence in our respective countries," he said.

Casey denied earlier reports that the United States had decided to close its embassy in Minsk and order the Belarusian Embassy in Washington and its consulate in New York to close as well.

"We are considering the full range of options in terms of our respective diplomatic presences," Casey said. "But at this point, we have not made any formal decisions."

The expulsion of 10 U.S. diplomats, who were Wednesday given 72 hours to leave the country, marks a new low point in relations with Belarus, which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described in 2005 as the last remaining "outpost of tyranny" in Europe.

It followed a Distributed Denial of Service DDOS attack at the weekend on the Belarusian Web site of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a news service funded by the U.S. Congress for the countries of the former Soviet bloc.

Such attacks, generally carried out by so-called botnets of personal computers that have become infected by viruses and are controlled unbeknownst to their owners by cybercrime gangs, flood the server hosting the site with millions of fake requests for information, overwhelming it.

The weekend attack took the RFE/RL Belarusian site offline for almost two days and affected eight other sites of the broadcaster's services that were hosted on the same server.

"Those sites were collateral damage," said Kimberly Zenz, an analyst with Internet security specialist iDefense.

DDOS attacks, because they are carried out by dispersed botnets controlled -- and rented out -- by shadowy criminal enterprises, are often very difficult to trace.

"As a reporter, I would have to say I don't know" who was behind the attack, RFE/RL's Belarusian service director, Alyaksandr Lukashuk, told UPI. "As an analyst, I can draw conclusions."

He said that the timing, targets and circumstances of the attack made the Belarusian authorities at least the prime suspect.

The attack took place Saturday, the 22nd anniversary of the meltdown at the Russian Chernobyl reactor -- a day that has become a focal point for Belarus' beleaguered opposition -- as RFE/RL began its live Web reporting on the protest.

Lukashuk said two other Web sites were targeted in the same attack, belonging to the opposition groups Charter 97 and Belarus Partisan.

In unusually tough comments, State Department spokeswoman Nicole Thompson told UPI the attack was "another example of the assault against free and independent media in Belarus" and said the U.S. government was calling on Minsk "to take the necessary steps to end these harmful and shameless attacks."

Lukashuk said the attack was the first of its size and kind against the service's site. In the past, he said, authorities had simply blocked the site from being seen in Belarus through the state-owned monopoly Internet service provider.

Such blockages, he said, had started three years ago and occurred "a couple of times a year … whenever there are elections or mass protests."

Taking down the site, if the Belarusian authorities were behind it, would be "a much more provocative move" than just blocking the address from the national ISP, said analyst Mark Loucas of the Fund for Peace, a think tank that studies global conflict.

"Blocking is a defensive move," he said. "Taking the whole site offline is offensive."

Zenz said that blocking a site from an ISP was an increasingly unreliable way of censoring the Internet. "There are widely available and very easily usable programs that you can download for free" to get around such blockages, she said.

Loucas said an offensive stance would be in keeping with what he called "a much more aggressive posture" the Belarusian government had adopted -- both internationally and internally.

"They have really cracked down," he said, adding that in part, the newfound confidence in Minsk was due to their renewed close relations with Russia, which included, he noted, a recent military deal on electronic countermeasures.

"They feel 'Russia has our back.' There's this kind of kinship … of the friendless."