YABLOKO’s
leader Sergei Mitrokhin called Governor of the Nizhni Novgorod
Region Vlary Shantsev to take urgent measures for restoration
of the regional web-site The Virtual Wyksa www.wyksa.ru which
had been the only source of information for the population
on terrible fires in the Wyksunsky District of the region.
From August 5 on the threashold of Shantsev’s inauguration
the web-site had been confronting continuous DDoS-attack,
and, consequently, ceased to function.
“Such ‘killing’ of the web-site helping to eliminate fires
means killing of people,” runs Mitrokhin’s letter to the Governor.
According to Mitrokhin, if Governor’s facilitation in restoring
of the web-site, will mean not only a very step in fighting
the fires, but will also clear the Administration off the
suspicions in involvement in the hackers’ attack. DDoS-attack
led to overload of the server and all the web-sites hosted
at The Virtual Wyksa server became unavailable. Due to the
fact that the web-site is hosted in the local web providing
Internet to the Wyksa city, the attack cut thousands of residents
off the Internet on August 7. The attack targeted at The Virtual
Wyksa resource deprived not only this web-site, but also administrations
of several districts of a possibility to provide via their
web-sites urgent information which is so important on these
fire-hazardous days.
We should not here that when fires began in the Wyksa District,
the web-site became the only source of information for many
residents giving answers to the most important questions “whether
relatives and next-of-kin are OK”. The web-site facilitated
organization of volunteers’ brigades and administrators and
permanent visitors of the web-site undertook coordinating
functions personally visiting the locations and broadcasting
verified information from the sites, moreover this information
turned out to be more detailed than that transmitted via the
hot lines.
The web-site administrators became coordinators for the snowballing
number of volunteers. The web-site moderators’ control over
the information was tough releasing only verified data. In
addition, the heads of the web-site also initiated collection
and distribution of humanitarian aid.
More details from the web-site owner Sergei Pantelyeyev at
YABLOKO’s
Russian web-site.
See also:
Freedom
of Speech
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