MOSCOW, April 6 (UPI) -- Russia's major online forum for free speech has suffered two major hacker attacks, and some bloggers blame the government.
LiveJournal Russia, with 4 million users, was hit by cyber attacks March 30 and again on Monday, The Moscow Times reported Wednesday.
Hackers used malware-infected computers, mostly in Asia and Eastern Europe, to flood LiveJournal's servers with requests and took them down for hours.
It was first thought that individual bloggers were being jammed, but LiveJournal management said it was the whole site.
"The reason for attack is more than clear in this case: Someone wants LiveJournal to disappear as a platform," Ilya Dronov, development director of site owner SUP, said Tuesday on his own blog.
Other LiveJournal bloggers named names.
Anton Nosik wrote that such massive and coordinated attacks would need considerable administrative and "financial support." He suspected the pro-Kremlin Nashi movement, which in the past has been accused of hacking the blogs of opposition activists and the Estonian government site.
Activist blogger Alexei Navalny charged the Kremlin had "counter-propaganda plan" before elections.
The Kremlin did not comment, but Nashi spokeswoman Kristina Potupchik called the claims "some person's groundless assumptions."
