Controversy
The Kavkaz Center caused a major controversy in September 2004 when the server it was being hosted on, located in Lithuania, was shut down by Lithuanian authorities (under pressure from Russian secret services) on hate speech charges, after a letter from the Chechen rebel commander Shamil Basayev claiming responsibility for the Beslan school hostage crisis and a series of photos from the preparations for the attack were published on the site. The website subsequently re-opened on a webserver at the Internet service provider PRQ, in Sweden, and then in April 2008 to an Estonian server, supplied by the AS Starman.
After the October 2005 Nalchik attack in the republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, the Kavkaz Center alleged that it was targeted by the FSB in a campaign to discredit them, which consisted on a massive worldwide distribution of spam mail which supposedly came from the Kavkaz Center website. After receiving several DoS attacks, a message was published on the Kavkaz Center homepage, stating that they never sent the spam many people received, and that it was a campaign to discredit them because of their points of view. Another spam attack campaign was active again on November 29, 2005, soliciting donations to a bank account in Sweden.
On the other hand, David McDuff, an editor with Prague Watchdog, has written that the Kavkaz Center is "thought by some observers to be a disinformation center run with the help of Russia’s special services."
In 2006, Russian journalist and regular KC contributor Boris Stomakhin was sentenced by a Moscow court to five years in prison for "fueling religious hatred". Another Russian regular contributor, Pavel Lyuzakov, was sentenced to two years in a prison colony for illegally acquiring and possessing a firearm in 2005.
Starting on 6 June 2012 and continuing for over 2 months, Kavkaz Center was the target of a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 45 million packets per second. The attack was said to be among the largest on record and took the agency’s main Sweden-based server and mirror sites offline in July 2012. Russia has also pressured Swedish authorities to take down the web site which is hosted by PRQ, a company owned by the founders of The Pirate Bay.
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