Pavel Sharamet: “Lukashenka has decided to sell Belarus to Russia”

On April 26 a DDOS-attack against the web-source “Belarusian partisan” started. The server of the site was attacked from 69 addresses in Paraguay, Amsterdam and South-Eastern Asia. On the same day the same problems were experienced by web-pages of Radio Svaboda and Charter’97.

In a little while the attack was repelled. April 29 the web-source “Belarusian Partisan” resumed its work. But in a day an article with strange contents appeared on the site. One of the authors of the “Belarusian Partisan” web-site Pavel Sharamet talked with Radio Svaboda on the phone from Moscow.

- Pavel, please tell what has happened, and what is done to resume work of the web-resource?

- On April 30 at daybreak (as all the base things are done at daybreak in Belarus), at about 6 a.m. local time, patrols of the site were broken, and strange articles were placed to the site. For instance, one of these articles was “Jews attack. Episode One”. That text told that Russian president Dmitry Medvedev is a Jew, which is concealed by him. At about 10 a.m. the changing of the site’s contents was taking place like an avalanche. As several journalists from different countries are responsible for control the site, it’s rather difficult to coordinate this work. Everyone else thought that other journalists had such crazy ideas. Time passed until everybody contacted each other, then the server was shut down. It took about an hour and a half. Those people who broke passwords replaced them, so we couldn’t regain control of the site. In order to stop this bandit attack, we had to shut down the servers. All the next days we analyzed the damage, and how far these hackers had gone. We cleaned the contents of the site, and it is to restart its work in a day or two.

- Pavel, tell us please, to your mind, is it a training before some important events, or is it a pre-planned and concrete action with concrete goals?

- DDOS-attack against from Paraguay or South-Eastern Asia against Belarusian independent sites is a usual practice of Belarusian secret services on the days when some important events are taking place in Belarus. All independent Belarusian web-sites have experienced DDOS-attacks to this or that extent. Breaking passwords is the first action of the kind within my remembrance over the past two years. I think that it is certainly preparation, and closer to the parliamentary election in autumn none of independent sites would escape serious problems in the form of hackers’ attacks or massive attacks. I think Belarusian readers will have problems with access to these sites, and that the Belarusian provider, who is a state monopolist, will switch off access to these sites, and so on. I think we are on the eve of a large-scale action of Belarusian intelligence agencies against Internet-community, against independent web-resources.

- Pavel, there are people in Belarusian intelligence agencies who have good knowledge of internet technologies. So why informational resources, for instance “Belarusian partisan” or others, attacked this time, do not have experts of such a level? Why haven’t it been anticipated? Or is it very expensive?

- We certainly have technical support staff, they know internet-technologies, and they solve such problems. Though we do not have so much money and technical opportunities as Belarusian intelligence services have. Moreover, we believe that breaking our passwords took place because since April we started to edit our site from Minsk. Before April we edited and controlled the site from abroad, for safety reasons namely. But at some stage we decided that we are not going anything awful or extraordinary, and that Belarusian authorities will have common sense. That is why we started to edit the site from Belarus gradually. A month was enough for them to break our site’s passwords. But every action provokes counteraction. It is very good that the Belarusian regime revealed its real nature now. It gives all of us a possibility to get ready for more serious events.

- Pavel, what interesting materials haven’t been read by your viewers at your site before the attack started?

- On April 30 we started to place comments on the occasion of Lukashenka’s address to the parliament. We also started to analyze the topic of supposed “sale” of Belarus to Russian political elite. It seems to me that we are on the threshold of very serious political events. It seems to me that under pressure or because of Putin’s persuasion Lukashenka has already taken a decision to exchange the independence of Belarus for some his political aims in Russia. And after we touched upon that topic, after we just touched upon it a little, and started to analyze it, “Belarusian partisan” started to encounter serious problems.