Twitter suffers DoS attack – Facebook and others also affected
By Dave Parrack
Hackers and spammers really don’t seem to like Twitter and Facebook. Instead, they target the sites, two of the world’s most popular social networking sites, on a regular basis. But while spam tweets, phishing Facebook messages, or malware updates are one thing, a full DoS (Denial of Service) attack is quite another. But that’s what happened today.
Twitter started to be affected around 9:30 a.m. (Eastern Time) and didn’t come back online until around 11:30 a.m. During this two-hour period, Twitter search was still working but people were reporting having difficulty signing into their account or sending Tweets. Other sites were also affected in similar ways, including Facebook and LiveJournal.
Twitter confirmed it was fighting a DoS attack in a post on the official Twitter blog. Even now the site isn’t running well, so it looks as though the fight is continuing. Facebook has yet to address the issue but it was also affected at around the same time Twitter was. It would suggest a coordinated effort against the sites but that has yet to be confirmed. And with the difficulties of tracking the origin of these types of attack it probably never will be.
Denial of Service attacks usually occur when the controllers of botnets, thousands of malware-infected computers linked together and manipulatable, decide to target a particular site. The reasons are many and varied but usually involve an attempt to blackmail the owners of the site being attacked – pay us lots of money and we’ll stop the attack.
Why Twitter though? It could be that the site is now big enough to enable a DoS attack to get the publicity needed by the person launching the attack for whatever reason. Or maybe it’s because Twitter has recently taken action against spammers by deleting thousands of accounts thought to exist purely to spam and spread malware.
I found the reaction to this DoS attack frankly laughable. It’s not pleasant to have a Web site you use regularly compromised in this way but the level of panic and hand wringing going on this morning was truly bizarre. What difference is not being able to Tweet going to make to most people’s lives anyway? For most of us it just means we can’t bore our followers with the minutiae of our everyday lives. What a disaster.
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on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 11:55 pm
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