The cyber wars are heating up, with the popular Russian government funded RT News becoming the latest victim to fall foul of a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that knocked the site out of action for around three hours earlier today.

RT News, whose pro-Russian government stance has seen them publish a number of stories in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, first revealed that its server was experiencing technical difficulties on Facebook, shortly before tweeting that its hosting provider had confirmed that a DDoS attack was the reason for the outage.

‘Antileaks’, the group that had earlier claimed responsibility for a similar attack on WikiLeaks, later claimed responsibility for taking down RT, although as of yet there is no proof that this group is behind the attacks. What is notable is that the attack came just hours before a guilty verdict was delivered against members of the punk band Pussy Riot, who have been highly critical of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Antileaks tweeted that it was responsible for the DDoS attack just 20 minutes after RT had confirmed it, attaching a hastag in support of the Pussy Riot members. Shortly afterwards, WikiLeaks weighed into the war of words on Twitter, condemning the attack and suggesting that it was due to RT’s support of Assange rather than anything to do with the punk band. RT had previously hosted Assange’s personal chat show, in which one of his guests was none other than Ecudador’s President Rafael Correa.

RT hasn’t said anything about how they managed to overcome the attack, simply posting on Facebook that their English-language site was “back online after DDoS attack but we’re still experiencing some tech difficulties.”