Russia shuts down anti-election web sites

RUSSIAN WEB SITES alleging that the Russian election was carried out by less than proper means have been shut down by massive denial of service attacks, according to reports.

Online criticism about the election quickly spread when it looked like the votes tallied up to more than 100 per cent, something that does not usually happen in elections.

Claims that the election was being fixed spread across the internet and were, by all accounts, swiftly followed by online suppression of the web sites.

"This weekend, popular Russian media websites and the Livejournal blogging platform were brought down by what appears to be a co-ordinated denial-of-service attack, just as the nation was about to hold elections," wrote Sophos security expert Graham Cluley in a blog post.

"Some have alleged that the cyber attack was deliberately timed to coincide with elections in Russia, as the sites were exposing what they claimed to be widespread voting fraud in the country."

A report at the Guardian says that various bloggers and video posters were quick to complain about what they see as discrepancies in normal voting practice.

These include a Youtube user in east Moscow explaining how the pens at booths in a school were filled with invisible ink, and another where a user showed how ballot boxes had arrived at a polling site with one-third already filled with votes.

According to the Guardian, liberal news outlets were attacked by hackers, while web sites belonging to local radio stations and other news agencies were distributed denial-of-service attacked out of circulation.

US gossip web site Gawker has a screen grab of one of the clues that bloggers seized upon to suggest a fixed election. The image, which shows the votes in one area, gives the election an impossible 146 per cent voter turnout from a possible 100 per cent of the voting population.

Livejournal is still claiming to be the victim of an ongoing denial-of-service attack. µ