Yet again the Russian LiveJournal has been under an avalanche of D-DOS attacks. The service is still unavailable for some users.

This is just another one is the series of hacking attacks on what is Russia's primary blogging platform. It has historically been the most popular service, due to the well developped commenting and community building opportunities and the fact that early on it has been a blog platform of choice for many Russian celebrities, businessmen, and public figures. Businessmen Mikhail Prokhorov and Alexander Lebedev, Nikita Mikhalkov, the director of Burnt by the Sun, and many others have long been using LiveJournal to air their opinions.

This year, however, proves especially difficult for the SUP holding, headed by Anton Nosik, that owns the Russian LiveJournal. In March 2011, the service was under a continuous assault of D-DOS attacks. This time the system was down since Monday, 25 July. Initially the LJ owners only reported technical difficulties. It later emerged that difficulties were more serious. Unlike in March when hackers attacked individual users, this time they turned their attention to IP addresses, thus aiming at the service itself. This complicated the indexing of new entries. One may suspect that users, especially paid account holders, would refrain from posting new articles: a lot of them earn money with LiveJournal blogs, and posting during a D-DOS attack, surely, has no business sense.

Turn to the West, and you will know that LiveJournal has long ceased to be a popular blogging platform: people for years have been setting up their blogs on Google's Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, or Tumblr. It is safe to say that none of these is remotely comparable in popularity with LiveJournal, in spite of significant lack in usability and business opportunities in LiveJournal. The service's main competitors are LiveInternet and Mail.ru. Considering the stages in which blogging has developed in the West, it may well be that Russia stands on the threshold of major changes in this sphere. But for that, LiveJournal has to entirely disprove its reliability.

Source: RBC Daily.