Cyber attacks on Putin critics look familiar to Estonians

Naturally, the authorites say they are also blameless in the affair of the distributed denial-of-service attacks that have been aimed at web sites known for being critical of President Putin.

"They killed the entire US server that hosted us," the outlawed National Bolshevik Party's online supervisor Alexei Sochnev told Associated Press.

The Bolsheviks said they had come under attack between February and April while trying to organise anti-government protests.

Pavel Chernikov, owner of news site Kommersant, reported that his site was also attacked after publishing a report on Russian exile Boris Berezovsky. A Moscow radio station was taken down by a denial-of-service attack.

Cyber sleuths monitoring the web ways point at an "inner circle" using dirty tactics to silence critics. Stanislav Belkovsky from the Moscow-based National Strategy Institute says it's a measure of how times have changed. "The Kremlin cannot just tell their editors to remove an unwanted publication" (any more), he said. µ