Social sites under attack
Social sites Facebook and Twitter yesterday stumbled as they became the targets of a massive DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. In fact, Twitter did more than stumble; the social tool was actually offline for an extended period of time – no doubt causing large amounts of panic amongst Twitter addicts.
Apparently, Google itself was also targeted by these attacks, but the internet giant was able to fend it off.
At this point in time, Facebook seems to be running without problems, although Twitter is still experiencing intermittent failures throughout the day. Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, had the following to say on the company blog: “The continuing denial of service attack is being mitigated, although there is still degraded service for some folks while we recover completely.”
According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, the attacks were thought to be targeted against one individual blogger who has been an outspoken critic of the conflict between Russia and Georgia. Other theories include a simple stunt pulled by a hacker to prove he could or an attack against Twitter due to software that blocks tweets with malicious links.
Facebook and Twitter have now both teamed up with Google in order to investigate the cyber-assault.
DDoS attacks are typically carried out by large botnets, networks of infected PC’s that send simultaneous requests to the targeted server, effectively overloading it so that it can’t respond to legitimate requests.
August 7, 2009 1:30 pm 1 Comment
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Gadgets and Gizmos Reviews ยป Social sites under attack | appreviewers.co.cc — August 7, 2009 @ 7:17 pm
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