Twitter taken offline and other services disrupted by DoS attack

A number of online services, including Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google's Blogger and YouTube were disrupted yesterday by what appears to have been a politically-motivated strike against a single blogger.

Twitter was down for several hours late on Thursday, and suffered ongoing problems for several hours after that, with other services also suffering from

Security experts from several affected companies said that the attacks appeared to be highly co-ordinated strikes against a Georgian blogger going by the name of Cyxymu.

The attacks targeted Cyxymu’s accounts on the various services, and appear to be timed to coincide with the eve of the first anniversary of Georgia’s five day war with Russia.

Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told the CNET News service: “It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”

According to researchers, the DoS attacks may have also been coupled with a spam campaign, that aimed to redirect users to the targeted sites and thereby overload them.

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READERS' COMMENTS

Not DoS!
Posted by Saad Rabia, Abu Dhabi, UAE on Sunday 9 August 2009 at 19:53 UAE time


What twitter got hit with wasn't DoS, it was more of a DDoS attacks, and although one extra letter doesn't look much, the whole scene changes based on that one extra word.

DoS is: Denial-of-Service attack, which is usually distributed by one source against another, making it a huge issue in general, but what twitter got was DDoS: Distributed Denial of Service attacks, in this scenario a bunch of little boys gather up on some forum on some website and plan to hit a target website with as many attacks as they can do, together and at the same time. This type of attack is less concerning because it's usually by internet kids done for the fun of it and in short periods of time; it is short and fast for many reasons.

Many websites get hit with such attacks per day, in fact twitter gets hit with it every once in a while but they usually follow up fast enough to post a "we will be back soon" message, unfortunately they weren't so fast this time, causing all the unnecessary fuss around the internet!

This is just like swine flu: Same old BS with a little more media hype.

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