Can Russia’s Novaya Gazeta crowd source its way around hackers?

by Michael Roston

Russia’s Novaya Gazeta is a newspaper that’s known for giving voice to the opposition to the policies of Russia’s Vladimir Putin-led government. Set up with money from Mikhail Gorbachev’s Nobel Peace Prize, the paper also employed Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist who exposed human rights abuses during Russia’s Chechnya War. She was brutally murdered by an assassin in October 2006. Other writers associated with Novaya Gazeta staff have been killed, too.

Now the paper is facing a sustained denial of service attack by unknown hackers:

Andrei Lipsky, deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta, tells The Associated Press that Monday was the seventh day of a debilitating denial-of-service attack from an unknown source.

Such an attack simulates millions of people visiting the Web site at the same time, overloading the server and causing it to crash. Novaya Gazeta routinely records 250,000 visits per week. Lipsky said the peak of the attack, last Thursday, saw 1.5 million visits per second. The site, Novayagazeta.ru, was still down as of late Monday.

via News from The Associated Press.

I have to ask, can NG work its way around the hackers? Could it use its dormant Twitter account to post links to externally hosted blog posts that contained the full text of its articles at any moment when it came under cyber attack? If its content was still available via other means when cyber thugs attempted to derail its opposition voice and keep the broader Russian-speaking world from accessing it, they would effectively defeat the hackers, especially if they marketed their Twitter feed, or other means, as a way to get around DDOS attacks.

Whatever the case, the online departments of major publications should think about how they’re going to deal with coming under sustained assault by cyber criminals with political agendas. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Wordpress could become more than just ’social marketing’ of news – they could become Plan B for making sure that your news reaches the world.

Both Andrew Sullivan and the now PBS-backed Tehran Bureau believed they were under attack by Iranian hackers during the country’s political crisis last summer. And if Twitter itself could fall to the ‘Iranian Cyber Army,’ and the New York Times got gamed by scam advertisers, how long until say the Old Gray Lady or CNN get targeted by the kind of people who are preventing the world from reading Novaya Gazeta online?

Publishers and editors, please add this agenda item to your next meeting.