The Moscow Times has been hacked for the second time in as many months, with attackers succeeding in briefly taking down the website that has been criticised by pro-Kremlin commenters.

The media group announced on its Twitter account on Wednesday evening that its site was down due to a “targeted attack”. After being inaccessible this morning, it was running again by this afternoon. It was unclear who was behind the cyber-attack.

The newspaper’s editor Nabi Abdullaev confirmed that the website had been attacked but said he had “no idea about the reasons behind this”.

In December, a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, which typically disrupts a site by flooding it with traffic from thousands of other infected computer systems, disabled The Moscow Times site for two days. Abdullaev said the latest incident was not a DDoS attack.

News websites in Russia have often been targeted – with the attacks becoming increasingly political, according to a 2014 report by Qrator Labs. Although outlets critical of the Kremlin have been shut down by hackers during elections and opposition protests in recent years, Russian government sites have reportedly also been targeted.

A cyber-intelligence company found in October that Russian hackers suspected of being linked to the Kremlin had spied on the Ukrainian government, European Union, Nato and others.

The Moscow Times is Russia’s only daily newspaper in English and has served as a training ground for many foreign correspondents since it was founded in 1992, including future New York Times Moscow bureau chief and Pulitzer Prize-winner Ellen Barry. It is distributed for free by cafes, restaurants and airlines.



But the newspaper’s coverage has drawn criticism from pro-Kremlin pundits in recent months as tensions have risen between Russia and the west. Writing in the newspaper Izvestia in December, Russian columnist Israel Shamir, who has previously praised Moscow for standing up to “US hegemony”, accused The Moscow Times of being a “militant anti-Putin paper, a digest for the western press that covers events in Russia, a ‘country of chaos,’ extremely tendentiously.”

Although the newspaper has run opinion articles by well-known Russian conservative commentators such as Maxim Shevchenko, it has also published content critical of state policy. An opinion piece this week by Human Rights Watch researcher Julia Gorbunova described a “surge in rights abuses in Crimea” since Russia annexed it last spring.

The Moscow Times website has also previously struggled with compromised advertisements spreading malware, according to a January 2014 report by the internet security company Malwarebytes.

Because it is owned by Helsinski-based company Sanoma, the newspaper could also find itself on the wrong side of a law recently signed by Vladimir Putin stipulating that foreign entities can own no more than 20% of Russian media. The law is set to come into full effect after a transitionary period lasting until 2017.

The Moscow Times is part of the Guardian’s New East network

