Ustream Says Russian Citizen Journalist Is The Focus Of Today’s DDoS Attack

Developing story: Ustream has sent out some details on the DDoS attack that is currently attacking its system — which was reported on earlier by GigaOm, along with another DDoS attack on Bambuser.

A Ustream spokesperson says that the attacked is targeted on user “reggamortis1″, a prominent protestor’s live Ustream channel. ”He has been broadcasting from a large protest at the ‘China Town’ metro stop in Moscow.” Ustream says that this is the third major DDoS attack on Ustream in the last six months related to a Russian citizen journalist, and the biggest DDoS attack it has ever had. The site is now gradually coming back up.

More Details

Ustream says the attack started at 5:30 am ET (2:30 pm in Moscow), with the attack, centered on the channel ReggaMortis1.
Ustream says it has never seen an attack of this scale on its worldwide data centers.
The attacks originated primarily from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Iran, “involving thousands of individual IP addresses.”
At the moment Ustream is in a heavy fight trying to mitigate the effect of the ongoing attack. “Our service is very slow, but working partially,” the company said in a statement.

Ustream is the world’s largest live streaming platform with 55 million unique visitors per month. It’s an open platform that allows for live video posts not just from individuals but more professionally-produced content as well. More than 125 hours of content is uploaded every minute and there are 10,000 broadcasts live on the site at any given time — meaning this DDoS represents a significant drop in volume.

Perhaps related to this, one of the groups associated with the Hacktivists Anonymous today claimed they were carrying out a DDoS attack on the Kremlin.