Identity of the attackers remains unknown

Mar 5, 2015 10:25 GMT  ·  By

The services of religious-centric Russian search engine “Rublev” have been interrupted by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack about five hours after being launched to the public.

The search engine is the project of Yuri Grymov, a Russian film director, and it spent two years in development before going live on Tuesday.

It is focused on providing the Russian Orthodox Christians news and interviews with religious leaders, and the possibility to connect to one another, thus dubbing as a social network, too.

Restrictive searches

The website can be used to search for prayers, religious icons, churches and monasteries, ask questions to priests, upload videos and images, or look for information about religious holidays and saints.

All queries are filtered so that no offensive results are returned. Many of the searches that receive a large number of results from regular engines get no answer on Rublev.

Using it to look for smut returns a biblical advice, the seventh commandment: “You shall not commit adultery.”

At the moment, it responds only to searches in Russian, and there is no information about plans to add more languages.

Attackers may never be identified

Grymov said in a blog post on Thursday that the services of the website were almost completely restored, but the DDoS crippled services and tools that are still not functional at the moment.

There is no information on the identity of the attackers, and it is unlikely that they will be discovered since DDoS attacks are carried out through a number of compromised systems.

The computers are instructed by the malicious operator to issue an avalanche of requests to the target in order to stop its activity. Basically, the server is bombarded with requests up to the point that it can no longer process them.

Cybercriminals have set up dedicated services for this kind of activity, where for a small price anyone can run an attack on a website.

The prices range from service to service and depend on the duration of the assault. Generally, an eight-hour attack costs less than $150 / €136.

Needless to say, Grymov was both surprised and upset by the incident; he took to Facebook to share updates on the matter with his more than 3,500 followers.