Livejournal, the popular blogging site, has been reporting sporadic distributed denial of service attacks over the last week, and some are blaming the Russian government.

Livejournal is one of the most popular blogging sites in the Russian Federation, with livejournal.ru ranking 273rd in traffic in the country. It is known as a place where many politically independent bloggers post. Even the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has a blog on the site.

On his blog, an executive at SUP, which owns Livejournal, Ilya Dronov, said the attacks were deliberate and aimed at destroying the site. He outlined the first attacks that came on March 31, at about 4 p.m. Moscow time. A second set of attacks came on April 4. The DDoS botnet originated largely in India and Southeast Asia, Dronov said.

Vladimir Ryzhkov, a livejournal blogger and opposition politician, told Reuters that the attack might have been an exercise on the part of the Russian government ahead of the elections to the country's legislature, the Duma, in December. Ryzhkov's own site, www.ryzhkov.ru, was down on Wednesday.

Dronov's blog was up on Wednesday, as was Medvedev's.

Cyberattacks on blogs and social networking sites have been a hallmark of the recent political conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere. In Egypt and Libya the governments even took the radical step of cutting off access to the Internet entirely in a bid to disrupt their opponents' ability to organize.

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