DoS Attacks vs. Social Media

Maybe you heard the sound of the world crashing down and people actually being productive at work yesterday while Twitter was unreachable. It wasn’t long before the full explanation came out—the popular microblogging site was the CNET reports, Facebook, LiveJournal and Blogger were all subject to a distributed denial-of-service attack yesterday, apparently to silence “Cyxymu,” one blogger from Georgia (the country not the state). Twitter was the most noticeably affected, though Cyxymu’s LiveJournal page was unaccessible.

The Chief Security Officer at Facebook, Chris Kelly, confirmed the attack to CNET:

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.

You have to ask who would benefit the most from doing this and think about what those people are doing and the disregard for the rest of the users and the Internet.

Google managed to keep its sites working just fine, and Facebook suffered from some periodic slowness, but was able to keep Cyxymu’s profile visible to other users in his area.

The attack was coordinated through spy- or malware. Infected computers were instructed to request hundreds of pages per second from the targeted sites. The attack is designed to overload the sites’ servers and/or make it impossible for real users to access the sites.

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