The timing of the DDoS was not coincidental, said Zvaners: Earlier, FRE had announced that it would cover antigovernment protests live on its Web sites. Although he said it was impossible to know the identity of the attackers at this point in RFE's investigation, he pointed a finger at the administration of Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus since 1996.

"This started on the day of a demonstration that they wanted no one to cover," said Zvaners. "They've never been real happy with us. In an ongoing sense, they are always 'jamming' our signals. We can't say for certain who did it, but you look at the circumstances, and you can start to draw some possible inferences."

"It's like we are back in the 50s and 60s, when [the USSR] used other ways to block our signal," Zvaners said. "It's a disappointing trend, but perhaps not unexpected."

A security researcher who has investigated what he calls "people's information war," said that the sequence of the attacks could provide a clue as to their source.

"From [a] disinformation perspective on who is behind this, it's execution gone wrong, mostly because when the attacks initially started, they seem to have targeted only the Belarus service of RFE's live coverage of the local opposition to building yet another Chernobyl," said Dancho Danchev, a Bulgarian researcher, in an e-mail reply to several questions. "[Only] later on did it started attacking seven other RFE sites.

"What if it was the other way around? Attack all of RFE's sites, and make it look like the primary target in this attack isn't targeted on purposely, but 'in between,'" he added.

Politically-motivated attacks such as the one against RFE are not new. A year ago, a series of DDoS attacks struck numerous sites in Estonia, a Baltic country that was once part of the USSR. Sites belonging to Estonia's prime minister and banks were among those brought down by the attacks. Although some observers initially suspected the Russian government, some security researchers later disputed that, saying the attacks were not coordinated enough to have come from one group.

Last month, CNN.com was attacked by a large-scale DDoS attack, possibly by Chinese "hacktivists" angered by the news organization's coverage of protests in Tibet.