It appears that the outage suffered by Twitter and technical problems affecting other social networks were the result of a denial of service attack targeting a single blogger, an activist who intended to commemorate the anniversary of last year's battle between Russia and Georgia. The sites have mostly recovered, but the attack underscores the ability of hackers to clog communication channels, given the proper resources.
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Facebook has confirmed that a pro-Georgia blogger was the target of a widespread distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that hit the top social networks and other Web sites. Facebook was able to fend off the attack, but Twitter was down for most of Thursday morning, and a company blog post indicates the popular microblogging service was still dealing with DDoS' after-effects Friday.
Media reports point to a blogger, known as "Cyxymu," who has named himself after a city in Georgia. Friday marks the first anniversary of the war between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway region of South Ossetia, and the attacks may have been timed to silence Cyxymu's use of his social media accounts to commemorate the date.
"Yesterday's attack appears to be directed at an individual who has a presence on a number of sites, rather than the sites themselves," Facebook spokesperson Kathleen Loughlin told TechNewsWorld. "Specifically, the person is an activist blogger, and a botnet was directed to request his pages at such a rate that it impacted service for other users. We've isolated the issue, and almost all of our users are able to enjoy the normal Facebook experience."
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