Friday, August 07, 2009

Twitter, Facebook Attack Targeted Single User

Quite amazingly, much of the world's social media infrastructure was brought to its knees Thursday by a denial of service attack that was aimed at silencing one Georgian blogger.

CNET News reports:

A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google's Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial of service attack that led to the site-wide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook executive.

The blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.

"It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard," Kelly said. "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."

As Jordan Furlong has noted on Facebook, it is hardly reassuring to see the fragilities of our online infrastructure so nakedly exposed:

There's a happy thought -- Russian nationalists sticking it to a Georgian blogger can take down half the social networks worldwide.

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