All Quiet on the Eastern Font

by Generalissimo Fresh-n-Fruity

2022-03-14 01:48:32

Digital Gar Gar Gar!

In the days leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine there was a lot of speculation in the media that Russia would launch cyberattacks against Ukraine and any other countries that were helping Ukraine. Although some researchers dismissed such speculation as a lot of hype, one thing is becoming pretty obvious: There are a lot of web sites down right now -- Russian and Belarus web sites.

Over at Grant Birkinbine's site Borscht, the Russian Site Monitor, uptime for several hundred Russian and Belarus sites is checked every few minutes. If a site is up, the site displays a green pill, if it's down it shows a red pill. According to the data, there are an awful lot of Russian and Belarus sites that are down right now.

That may be due, in part, to projects such as StopPropaganda and NoRussian, two open-source distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) tools that allow anyone to educate themselves about how DDoS attacks work, or to launch their own DDoS attacks against Russian sites.

StopPropaganda comes in a number of different package formats but it's heart is a Golang program that floods a list of Russian websites with traffic, attempting to overload them and take them offline.

NoRussian consists of a single web page that repeatedly attempts to load data from the main pages of Russian and Belarus Official State News sites using a short Node script. One person running such a script wouldn't cause much of a blip, but several thousand volunteers running it very well might.

It's hard to say just who or what is causing these outages, but one thing is certain: there are an awful lot of Russian and Belarus sites that are down right now.

Check it out yourself

punchbowl@pigdog.org