Contentinople - Erin Barker - News Bits: Twitter, Facebook Crippled by DoS Attack

Written by Erin Barker

Friday, August 7. 2009 at 11:45 AM EDT 1 comment

Digg

Del.icio.us

Email This

no ratings

Twitter Inc. , Facebook , and several Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) sites were hit with a massive denial-of-service attack yesterday, causing outages and delays across the Web

According to The New York Times, though sites like Facebook faced delays, Twitter was definitely hit the hardest by the attack, experiencing outages for at least two hours, starting at 9 a.m. ET. The site was still working to restore service to all users late last night.

"It's unusual to see an attack on a site lasting that long," Stefan Tanase, a malware researcher at the technology security firm Kaspersky Lab, told NYT. "Generally there are procedures in place in case of such an attack, but unfortunately Twitter has a long history of security-related issues, and this really shows that they are not very mature in this area yet."

The massive attack was apparently all for the sake of one man, an anti-Russian Georgian blogger called Cyxymu whom attackers were attempting to silence.

"Maybe it was carried out by ordinary hackers but I'm certain the order came from the Russian government," the blogger told The Guardian.

Also, in case anyone out there cares or noticed at all, Livejournal was also hit and experienced a temporary outage.

In other news:

In a very strange Wall Street Journal article that reads more like a story from The Onion, different Twitter users -- including a man who wanted to live Tweet a circumcision, a woman who was dying to announce her purchase of a pair of jeans, and none other than MC Hammer -- recount the horror of yesterday's outage:

"My baby wasn't acting right. Did I notice it was out? That would be the equivalent to asking, did you notice you woke up?" says Mr. Hammer, whose given name is Stanley Burrell. "My immediate thought was, 'There is no replacing this platform... I couldn't satisfy the need to communicate.'"

One of the coping techniques WSJ suggested: Write down your Tweets and save them for later. Genius!

Oddly WSJ also published a separate article, with the exact same angle, about how the outage affected Andy Dick, Brooke Burke, and Lance Armstrong. Which I'm sure was the first concern on everyone's minds when the outage occured.

However, social networking sites may be facing a more serious threat than DOS attacks: old people. According to research from the media regulator Ofcom, creeped-out teens are fleeing the sites as gross grownups join them in hordes. The percentage of 15- to 24-year-olds with a profile on a social-networking site dropped for the first time this year, by 5 percentage points, while the percentage of older demographics continues to rise.

Tags: Business, Facebook, Legal, Social Networks, Twitter

Digg

Del.icio.us

Email This

Comments

young fleeing social networking sites
cliffordjay
Rank: Vizier
Friday August 7, 2009 6:19:32 PM

no ratings

Of course the young have to distinguish themselves from older people but, as an older person, it makes sense to me that the older demographic is on the networking sites. We've got hordes of old friends that we've lost touch with. And less time to get together. I remember when we could hang out every night of the week...

Start your Own Board

Messages List | Post a Message | Reply