Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has been hit by a massive denial-of-service attack, the organization reports. As many as 50,000 fake hits every second inundated the Belarus Service on the very day it was to “report live on a rally of thousands of people, organized by the Belarusian opposition” — and the disruptions soon spread to other RFE/RL sites.
RFE/RL President Jeffrey Gedmin said he is deeply concerned by the attacks. “If free and independent media existed in these countries where we’re working and broadcasting, we would have no reason to exist,” Gedmin said. “The Belarusians, the Iranians — they all have basically the same objective. They see free information — flowing information of ideas and so forth — as the oxygen of civil society. They’ll do anything they can to cut it off. If it means jamming, if it means cyberattacks, that’s what they’ll do.”
I suspect we can expect to see more of the same when the Beijing Games begin. China’s cyber militia is the envy of the totalitarian world.