Russian Hackers Attack Live Streaming Video Sites
Hackers shut down a United States online video company on Wednesday that was being used by Russian activists to stream live video of protests in Moscow, prompting the company’s leaders to launch a Russian-language version of the site.
Brad Hunstable, chief executive and co-founder of the company uStream, said that the online platform was down for nine hours. He said it was the third highly coordinated attack from Russia in six months. He noted that each attack took place at the same time Russian activists were using the platform to stream live video of protests in Moscow and other cities.
He said the attack began on Wednesday at 5:30 a.m. Eastern time, targeting a channel operated by a Russian citizen journalist filming the protests. Known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS, it involved thousands of IP addresses coming primarily from Russia, Kazakhstan and Iran that flooded the site, Mr. Hunstable said, crippling the company’s data centers all over the world.
