Russian attempt to silence dissident stopped the tweets

LONDON: Russian hackers trying to silence a Georgian critic of Moscow's policies may have been behind an attack that shut down two of the world's most popular social networking sites.

Twitter went offline for several hours on Friday, while Facebook and Livejournal suffered major slowdowns following a large distributed denial-of-service attack.

The attack is believed to have been aimed at a 34-year-old economics lecturer and blogger who criticises Russia's military presence in the Caucasus.

As Facebook and Twitter launched investigations yesterday, a blogger who uses the name of "Cyxymu" (a latinised version of Sukhumi, the capital of the Georgian breakaway republic, Abkhazia) announced he was the attack's first target.

Max Kelly, Facebook's chief security officer, confirmed Cyxymu was the target.

"It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard."

- INDEPENDENT