First Tweet Bombing, is a Twitter Denial of Service attack next?
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Twitter, Blog, Security, Internet on
Ross Noble is, as anyone who has seen his stand up performances, a somewhat surreal comedian. While I am not convinced there is such a thing as a typical Twitter user, it’s unlikely that Noble would fit such a category. So it came as no real surprise when he invited his followers on Twitter, all 30,275 of them, to effectively Twitter Bomb Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy with silly questions.
McCarthy, known by some as the Twitter Tsar courtesy of heading up new media campaigning for the Labour Party, was duly bombarded with totally daft questions. Things got even more surreal when, in a totally unexpected turn of events, rather than ignore the questions or complain about being Twitter bombed, McCarthy started answering as many as she could.
Indeed, across a six hour period she managed to answer more than 100 of them and that was inbetween meetings and casting votes in parliament.
My favourite would probably have to be the response to someone challenging her to start a Mexican wave in the House of Commons: “We do it on the Labour benches when Nick Clegg is speaking”. Although, to be fair, the reply of “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” to Ross Noble’s own query as to if Billy Ocean would make a difference to Labours chances on election day was pretty sharp as well. The most surreal answer has to be “I frequently dress up as the Holiday Armadillo” but I’m not going to tell you what the question was, you can go find that yourself by looking at McCarthy’s Twitter stream.
While this was all done in the best possible taste, and Noble himself set ‘rules’ asking people to be polite but daft in their questioning, it does make one wonder how long it will be before Twitter gets used to let off some seriously disruptive bombs. After all, there is an election coming up and politicians are embracing Twitter as a means of engaging the voters. All it takes is for a coordinated campaign of Tweet Bombing by accounts with enough members between them to make it count and we could witness the first TDoS - Twitter Denial of Service attack.
When that does happen, and I suspect it will be when rather than if considering we’ve already seen the political power of the beast, I will be hugely interested to see how Twitter management react. It could prove to be a tough test for the Twitter powers that be, especially if it wants the business world to start taking notice.
Rated: 66.67% (3 votes)
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Comment by Shane - December 11, 2009 on 12:38 am
It’s already happend, albeit in France. Frédéric Lefebvre, spokesman for the UMP got kicked off twitter within 24hrs after thousands of people signalled him as a spammer…… it will only be a matter of time before the same happens in the UK.
Comment by blandadda - December 11, 2009 on 8:20 pm
I think the posting was talking about denial of service attacks, politically or otherwise motivated, and not spammers though.
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