Hacker attack shuts website of Novaya Gazeta

Novaya Gazeta, Russia´s opposition newspaper, complained to officials about a hacker attack which has kept its website offline for 6 days.

Russia's most outspoken opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, said on Monday it had complained to officials about a hacker attack which has kept its website offline for the past six days.

- We filed our complaint with the interior ministry, the investigative committee, the prosecutor general and the FSB security service and we are waiting for their replies - said newspaper spokeswoman Nadezhda Prusenkova.

Novaya Gazeta, which frequently criticises the Russian authorities and runs muckraking articles about corruption, has been posting its articles on several other websites since its main site went down on January 26.

The site was brought down by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, in which hackers bombard a site with so many requests for data that legitimate users cannot visit it, Novaya Gazeta said last week after the attack began.

A huge wave of DDoS attacks was carried out on Estonian government websites in 2007 after the Baltic country moved a Soviet World War II monument, angering Russia. The Kremlin denied accusations it was behind the attacks.

Novaya Gazeta was the employer of Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent opposition journalist gunned down outside her Moscow home in 2006. Four of the paper's reporters have been murdered or died under mysterious circumstances since 2000.