So the Soros-funded Central Asian news-and-views site Eurasianet.org (where I used to work) is down because it has been hacked.
Or, as geeks always tell us with withering scorn, not "hacked," but merely subjected to a distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attack, which is sort of like "too much of a good thing" on the Internet with lots of page hits. Of course, hacking *is* defeating the legitimate purpose of any site, so it *is* hacking, and hacking *isn't* a word we should somehow "preserve" for "a better world". There isn't one.
But why would EurasiaNet.org be hacked now?
Well, one reason is just opportunistic hacking, zero-day attacks or DDOSes or other exploits just because during the Thanksgiving holiday, less staff are on duty and so on, and that can stretch into the next week, as the staff orders gadgets online on Cyber Monday.
But it's already Wednesday, and the site has now been down for more than 20 hours, as the first announcement by the staff on Twitter was 20 hours ago as marked by the tweet.
Study the twitter feed and the staff is saying they are "working on it".
It's not just "down" with some kind of fail-while icon, but "down" and labelled by "the Internet" as a dangerous site -- a site that if you keep clicking through the warnings, you may find will subject you yourself to a malware attack.
To be sure, sometimes Google is being over-protective and such warnings are false -- I've had them put on my mere blog on this commercial site merely because somebody doesn't like the content and then tries to subject me to a takedown by pretending I have "malware".
And that is likely what has happened with EurasiaNet -- so it is fairly sophisticated and opportunistic and may not be related to one single post but an overall desire to disrupt news.
Indeed, there are lots of people who don't like this site (and I've discovered more of them since I left there) -- on the US government side, there are disgruntled State Department flunkies and military advisors posted to these hell-holes who don't like the criticism focused on them when their host government are really the problem; then there are all those Central Asian governments themselves who are nasty as the day as long; then there are various factions fighting those nasty Central Asian governments who are sometimes even nastier themselves, like violent Islamist movements or nationalist dissidents with their creepy agendas for the minorities -- and so on. Central Asia is a region where you are much more likely to get a hate email than a "like" on your Facebook page. The hate mail I've personally gotten from either Kyrgyz nationalists or Uzbek Islamist resistance groups are among the worst I've gotten in my life -- except, of course, for mail from Serbia and Russia, usually leading the world in hate-mailing.
The first question I'd always ask about a hack is "is it Russia?" That's because most hacking comes from Russia in the OSCE space; much of it is state-inspired or state-endorsed or state-tolerated, i.e. against Estonians, Georgians, etc. Russians have the ill-will, the capacity, the legions of programmers with time on their hands, etc.
But EurasiaNet tilts toward Russia decidedly, as not only Jennifer Rubin has written but others privately note who even still work there. It's party of that whole Soros/"progressive"/Center for American Progress take on Russia which is decidedly pro-Kremlin. Hey, the Socialist Scholars' Conference from 1984 called, they don't want their program back, however, as you already have a copy. But if it's fading on that old thermo-fax paper, they can give you a fresh digital version.
With a story like this, EurasiaNet only illustrates the endless compassion they have for the Kremlin perspective:
Russia Objects To NATO Missile Defense In Turkey: Russia has weighed in on ongoing discussions between Turkey and...
So while I look first to see if there is a story that might have angered Russians, I also check for Uzbeks, who are among the nastiest in the region with a high capacity for harassment as the largest state and most powerful. So is it this?
Uzbekistan Will Come Back Soon, CSTO Insists: Uzbekistan will come crawling back into the arms of Russia as soon as...
Or that garden perennial about the lack of heat and the gas shortage which you could cut and paste from the last 25 winters?
With the site down, we can't see the full version even in Google cache, but maybe that and some other negative stories on Uzbekistan means Uzbeks are a candidate.
Let me tell you what story it's *not*:
On the Trail of Turkey's "KIng of Nuts": The pistachio may be the nut most people associate with Turkey, but in the...
Another candidate for disgruntled-reader-of-the-week might be:
Georgia's Arrests: Who’s Next?: If they were to bet on which high-ranking Georgian official goes to prison next...
or
Georgia: Will Ex-Defense Minister Irakli Okruashvili Assist the Prosecution of "Bigger Fish"?: Georgian President....
But...There's no question that the new Georgian leader has the backing of the Kremlin, and it's not clear yet just how far that backing will go. But here, again, Russia and the new Georgian leadership are not likely hacking commissioners here -- EurasiaNet is harsh on Saakashvili and soft on the Kremlin-backed leader Ivanashvili, calling anyone in Congress slightly critical of Saakashvili as "Russophobes" although never dubbing themselves "Russophiles".
I don't think it's going to be anything related to Kazakhstan -- except for the critical reporting from Joanna Lillis, more often than not, we get these kind of stories that are either human-interest fluff or "laugh-at-the-dictator" stories that wind up distracting from ongoing torture:
Kazakhstan Photo: Black and White: Kids play chess with pieces several feet tall at the First President's Park in...
It's not going to be the Tajiks, because the story of their blocking of Facebook is widely reported by sites with far more traffic than EurasiaNet.
This might be a candidate for an axe-grinder:
Kyrgyzstan: Local Voting Unsettles National Politics: Kyrgyzstan, the closest thing Central Asia has to a working...
Well, take a look yourself at the feed for the last two weeks and see if you can guess which story led to the hack. Most likely there isn't a story as such, but merely an opportunity. Oh, and gosh, it could never be Drupal, could it?! Dare we imagine that lovely "free" open-source software with endless part-time consultants to keep it functioning could be a greater threat than a nasty Central Asian regime?
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