OAC Shut Down Top Shopping and News Portal, Belarusian Web Shattered with Attacks
21/12/2014
According to BAJ on December 20, the Operative Analytical Center (OAC) reported that onliner.by had been excluded from the national domain zone upon request of the Trade Ministry.
According to the scant report of the OAC, the Trade Ministry had revealed violations of trade regulations, including work with online services. Onliner failed to take measures to remove the violations, so it was decided to “exclude the respective domain name from the register of the national segment zone”. We should remind that according to presidential edict ¹60, business activities of Belarusian companies can be performed only through the national domain zone.
Onliner.by has been among top retail trade websites, representing the biggest part of Belarusian business entities, and competing with another famous portal TUT.by. Both the websites started as catalogues and advertising platforms, but developed into huge portals with news, forums and projects.
Now Onliner is already unavailable in .BY domain, but Onliner.ru was started.
This happens at the background of a really black Friday for Belarusian websites. On December 19, Onliner and TUT.by were unavailable for some time. Beltelecom warned that users might experience problems while surfing the web because of DDoS attack. Gossip has it that the attack might have been unintentional and caused by a huge number of people wanting to find out currency rates and just about what’s going on in the country.
After midday, reports about websites blocking came from Charter’97 and Belaruspartisan. According to Charter’97, the trouble was experienced in Belarus through Beltelecom channel. On December 20, the website has stayed unavailable, the editor saying it has been blocked at the main gateway.
On the evening December 19, gazetaby.com (Solidarity) also reported about access troubles assuming it was blocking because the website was available via proxies. As of evening December 20, it is still unavailable. On December 20 at around 7 pm, the websites of the news agency BelaPAN and naviny.by were down, too.
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