Cyber Attacks Hit Critical Serbian Websites

The Pescanik.net website said on Monday that it had been brought down by a Denial of Service (DOS) attack a day earlier, directly after publishing allegations that that Serbian Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic had plagiarised parts of his PhD thesis.

Serbian Minister’s University Accused

Pescanik.net alleged on Monday afternoon that it had discovered that the original cyber attack came from an IP address that originated at Megatrend University, where Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic studied.

However it said that while Sunday’s attack came mainly from Megatrend, renewed attacks on Monday came from Canada and the Czech Republic using the Serbian academic media network as a proxy.

But Mica Jovanovic, the rector of Megatrend University, denied that the establishment had any involvement in the attack on the site.

“We do not have such technology capacities,” Jovanovic said.

He also said that he intends to sue the authors of the Pescanik.net allegations that the minister's PhD was plagiarised.

"The spike in traffic peaked when the disputed PhD thesis was mentioned during B92 television's prime-time political talk show ‘Impression of the Week’ (‘Utisak nedelje’),” Pescanik.net editor Svetlana Lukic told Balkan Insight.

She said that the site, which carries analysis and opinions by human rights activists, journalists and academics, was overloaded by the sustained DOS attack and became unavailable to its readers.

Lukic said that Pescanik's web team had determined that numerous requests to access the site were coming from masked IP addresses, a method often used by hackers who employ computers who send a barrage of automated requests intended to overwhelm...