Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has called the recent cyber attacks on popular Russian blogging and social networking website LiveJournal ‘outrageous and illegal’.

Medvedev, who is a LiveJournal user himself, urged the website and the country’s law enforcement agencies to investigate the attack and bring the guilty parties to light.

The president’s comments come after the blogging platform was bombarded with DDoS attacks, making the website unavailable for use. According to security software vendor Kaspersky Labs, the DDoS attacks had originated from hundreds of infected computers in China, the US and Western Europe.

“It should be obvious to specialists in the Russian-speaking blogosphere that the list affects some of the most popular bloggers on LiveJournal who write about a wide variety of things,” Kaspersky Lab expert Maria Garnaeva, said in a blog post.

“It is not known if this was an attempt to ‘blur’ the real target of the attacks, which may have been clearly designated during the first DDoS attacks, or if the list of blogs that had fallen out of favour had become bigger,” she added.

Russian media is also reporting that newspaper website Novaya Gazeta has also fallen prey to the same wave of cyber attacks, which began on Thursday.