Article by George Norman

On 12 Aug 2009

Micro-blogging site Twitter hasn’t been fairing very well recently. Last week, on Thursday, the site was taken offline by a massive denial-of-service attack and since then the team at Twitter has been working hard to recover. Yesterday, the 11th of August, Twitter went down again – and it seems that it is a denial-of-service attack this time as well. The main difference is that this time Twitter went offline for just half an hour (approximately).

“We're currently experiencing another wave of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against our system. Expect periodic slowness and errors until the attack passes or is countered by our operations team and hosting provider. Updates will be provided as we get them. Thanks for your patience,” explained Twitter’s Alex Payne.


The big question here is this: is this attack somehow related to last week’s attack? The general consensus so far is that the massive denial-of-service attack that hit Twitter (and Facebook, LiveJournal, Google Blogger and YouTube) targeted an anti-Russian blogger called Cyxymu. Kind of a lousy tactic, because the attack brought Cyxymu into the spotlight and now everyone knows him. And this second attack is only going to fuel the discussion about the blogger and increase his presence in the public eye.

Not that Cyxymu minds this. “I am not happy that [my] blogs were attacked. But it is good that I get famous. I think Obama knows about me, because he likes Internet news,” the blogger told the LA Times.

Graham Cluley, Senior Technology Consultant with Sophos, company that specializes in providing security software solutions, brings forth one interesting idea: what if the attack was perpetrated by a “copycat who heard how easy it was to bring down Twitter, and thought it might be "cool" to try it for themselves.”

Moving on with our Twitter coverage, it must be said that one other interesting thing happened on the 11th of August - Sara Morishige Williams, the wife of Twitter CEO Evan Williams gave birth to an 8 pounds, 21 inches baby boy. She kept the whole world up to date on her condition by tweeting about it; the first tweet announced that she went into labor and over the next 14 hours updates were made periodically.




Tags: Twitter, Denial-of-service, DoS, DDoS, CEO, Evan Williams, Cyxymu

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