Kyrgyzstan goes offline following Russian hacker attack

Russian hackers took the nation of Kyrgyzstan off the Internet.

The two biggest Internet service providers in Kyrgyzstan have been under attack since January 18, said Don Jackson, the director of threat intelligence at SecureWorks Inc. in an interview with Computerworld. As of Wednesday afternoon, the outage was still impacting Internet use in Kyrgyzstan.

The "massive, sustained distributed denial-of-service attack," is ongoing and has kicked most of the country off the Internet, Jackson said. E-mail service to and from a U.S. air base in Kyrgyzstan has also been interrupted.

The attacks have been traced back to a group of Russian and ethnic Russian hackers who launched a similar attack against Georgia, another former Soviet republic last year. The reasons for the attack on Kyrgyzstan are not clear, but speculation centers around various regional political disputes.