Jew World Order

Ustream was hit with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack overnight that was apparently designed to interfere with the streaming of videos from anti-government demonstrations in Russia, according to the CEO of the live-streaming site.

Brad Hunstable, Ustream CEO
(Credit: Ustream)

“We are 100 per cent confident that they were targeting a specific channel on Ustream of a Russian citizen journalist. This is the third time in the last six months that a specific Russian citizen journalist was directly targeted through this complex and highly adaptive attack,” Brad Hunstable, co-founder and CEO of Ustream said in a phone interview from Budapest. “We get DDoS attacks all the time, and we fight them off. It’s not a big deal. But this is adaptive beyond anything we’ve seen.”

The attack started at around 7.30pm AEST yesterday (2.30pm in Russia), and it took Ustream engineers about 10 hours to get the site back up again for its 55 million users worldwide, he said. The attacks used a variety of protocols, such as UDP and TCP/IP, and the requests were also coming from Russia, Kazakhstan and Iran, he added.

“What we saw today were systematic attempts, method after method, up to seven methods,” Hunstable said, adding that it was the largest attack that the site has seen in its more than five years of operation.

Asked whether he believed that the Russian government was behind the attack, Hunstable said that he could not speculate. “I won’t speculate on who or why. What I do know is that there is no denying that specific Russian citizen journalists were individually targeted,” he said. “We are in contact with many of the government agencies across the world. Ustream is back up and running, and we put the Russian protests back up on our front page. This is about internet freedom, and our mission is to allow people to do this and we’re not going to stop until we do.”

The company “lost significant revenue” due to the outage, and Hunstable said that executives will be doing a full review of how to handle attacks going forward to minimise the economic impact.

The other recent DDoS attacks that were targeted at silencing citizen journalists in Russia were on 6 December 2011 and 6 January 2012, both days of anti-government protests, according to Hunstable. Yesterday’s attack targeted the ReggaMortis1 channel on Ustream, and previous attacks targeted the Ridus channel, he said.

The attacks all used the “same footprint, and focused on citizen journalists in Russia using our iPhone and Android mobile broadcasting capability,” he said.

GigaOM reported earlier that live-streaming service provider Bambuser was also under attack.

Demonstrators have been protesting since before and after the inauguration of President Vladimir Putin on Sunday, clashing with police, and hundreds have been detained and arrested. In addition to complaints about election fraud, protesters are clamouring for political reforms.

Russia’s move from communism to a capitalism-based economy led to a new class of billionaires who own formerly nationalised assets, while crime syndicates have moved their enterprises online. Many of the early credit card data theft and identity fraud rings were based in Russia and former Eastern Bloc countries.

Via CNET