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Speculation Runs Wild Over Motive for Twitter Attack

by Terrence O'Brien on August 10, 2009 at 02:09 PM

Last week's Twitter outage really put a damper on our traditional work routine, which involves wasting copious amounts of time sending and receiving 140-character morsels of information and pseudo-human contact. Some of us took the opportunity to rediscover the joys of being a productive member of society, while others, like TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, just decided to continuously update their blogs with what would otherwise have been tweets.

Once the panic passed and we remembered we had friends IRL (in real life) we should probably be talking to, it was time to ask the more important questions: how, and why, did this happen?

The specifics are still being ironed out, but what is clear is that Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal were victims of a Denial of Service (DoS) attack that overwhelmed their servers.

The much more difficult question, though, is the "why."

Usually, such attacks have a financial motive, but researchers are unsure how the hackers could have stood to make money by bringing Twitter to its knees. Unless they were simply paid to do so, that is.

Many believe the attack is the work of Russian nationalists seeking to silence a Georgian blogger, who goes by the screen name Cyxymu. Cyxymu's accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, Google's Blogger, and YouTube were all the targets of a botnet-powered spam attack that deluged those pages with a surge of users. But it appears that the spam attack was not the cause of the outages. A consensus does seem to be forming, though, that Cyxymu, a prominent economics professor in Georgia, was indeed the target of the DoS attack. It's believed that Russian nationalist hackers took out the services in order to keep him silent on the eve of the anniversary of the Russian-Georgian war.

There are other theories, though, regarding the motive for the attack. Andrew R. Hickey of ChannelWeb believes it was perpetrated purely for "bragging rights." Meanwhile, Roger Thompson, chief research officer at AVG, told Computer World that he believes a vigilante attempting to bring attention to the danger of botnets is behind the offensive.

Regardless of whether or not Twitter was targeted for political reasons, it is clear that the site proved far too easy to take out -- and far too hard to fix. More than 24 hours later, many users (including some here in the Switched office) were still experiencing problems updating their Twitter statuses. Is this latest failure just a "growth pang" for the burgeoning micro-blogging service? Or is this just further evidence that Twitter is ill-prepared to handle its explosion in popularity? [From: CNET, ChannelWeb, Computer World, LA Times, SiliconRepublic, ZDNet, and TechCrunch]

Tags: denial of service, DenialOfService, dos attack, DosAttack, security, top, twitter

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