Were 15 fat Russians stuck in Twitter’s revolving door?
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Twitter, Facebook, Security, Google, Internet on
Security expert Graham Cluley recently described a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack as being like “15 fat men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time”.
I wonder, in the case of the attack aimed at Twitter this week, if those would be 15 fat Russian men?
Unlike the previous Twitter willy waving massacre which we reported upon, this one was not aimed at followers but the service itself and succeeded in pretty much grinding it to a halt for much of the day.
The Twitter status pages yesterday first reported that the service was “defending against a denial-of-service attack” followed by the site coming back up but “continuing to defend against and recover from this attack”. Twitter head honcho Biz Stone blogged Twitter was “working closely with other companies and services affected by what appears to be a single, massively coordinated attack”. As to the motivation behind the event, Stone prefers not to speculate. Others are not so shy.
Take the aforementioned Mr Cluley, for example, who has asked the question “was Twitter denial-of-service targeting anti-Russian blogger?”
Cluley bases his question around the fact that the attack happened on the first anniversary of Georgian troops moving into South Ossetia, and the military conflict which followed. Twitter ground to a halt, but it looks like Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google’s Blogger services were also targeted.
Amazingly, there is now what appears to be informed speculation that the attacks were not so much against the services as against a single user of those services: an unlucky blogger and anti-Russian activist by the name of Cyxymu who hails from Tbilisi.
Max Kelly, the Chief Security Officer at Facebook has even gone on the record telling CNET News that Cyxymu was the target of the DDoS attack, with all his different accounts spread across the impacted sites being attacked at the same time.
Cluley points out that “Cyxymu’s YouTube channel is still available” and “contains a number of videos, many related to skirmishes between Russians and Georgians” before asking “could these have been the webpages that the denial-of-service attack was trying to blast off the internet?”
Twitter has managed to survive the likes of Moonfruit marketing and Koobface infections but surely it should have done better in protecting itself against the fat blokes in the revolving door? After all, Facebook and Google seemed to manage OK.
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