Facebook & Twitter Come Under DDoS Attacks

On August 6, 2009, Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks blocked the access to two leading social-networking websites, Facebook and Twitter. A DDoS attack is one in which an attacker sends an overwhelming number of queries to a website posing as genuine requests thereby bringing down the site to a non-functional state.

Thus, with the recent DDoS attack, users wanting to access Twitter.com could not use the micro-blogging service. However, the site soon informed that it was doing the needful to resolve the problem.

On the other side, Max Kelly, Chief Security Officer of Facebook, said that pro-Georgian blogger Cyxymu's profile on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and LiveJournal was targeted that led to the Twitter outage, affecting all the other websites. While services on most of the sites have been restored, Twitter continues to suffer from minor problems, as reported by TechTree on August 7, 2009.

It is clear that the attack represented a hugely coordinated assault that might have employed numerous infected computers as a botnet. Kelly also said the attack simultaneously struck several properties with the objective to prevent people from hearing his voice. He also added that his company was aggressively probing into the attack's source and hoped that it would succeed in finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice.

Meanwhile, specialists state that the DDoS attacks can occur from people motivated with earning ransom money or to make a declaration related to politics.

Investigators at San Francisco-based Packet Clearing House, a non profit organization that monitors Internet traffic, said that the DDoS assaults might have been associated with the prevailing confrontation between Georgia and Russia on the political front. They began when hackers through a network of bot-infected PCs sent a surge of malicious e-mails having web-links to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks that a pro-Abkhazia activist wrote.

However, some felt the particular attack did not really have the intention as claimed rather an aim where someone was showing off his skills of using a gigantic botnet. Nevertheless, effective attacks of the kind against well-known websites like Amazon.com, CNN and eBay were frequent in the current decade.

Related article: Facebook Users Should be Careful of a Computer Virus

» SPAMfighter News - 8/27/2009