Hackers attack popular Facebook, Twitter sites
Aug/09Comments
Representatives from both Facebook and Twitter have confirmed today that attackers executed successful Denial of Service attacks against their respective web sites causing downtime and confused users during the event. Twitter was down for a couple of hours. Both web sites claim to have completely restored functionality for all social networking fanatics the world over.
A Denial of Service (or Dos) attack occurs when single computer endpoints (like a web site) are flooded with network requests at the same time, slowing the response time for legitimate users down to a crawl. A DoS attack can also be distributed, which means a collection of compromised computer systems simultaneously (but separately) send requests to an endpoint, quickly bringing almost any network to its knees.
News reports have not indicated any motive from the attackers. In fact, they haven’t identified the attackers at all up until this point. My money is on a group of computer nerds who dislike the idea of social networking sites and wanted some attention. DoS attacks aren’t used to steal information or cause malicious harm to the targeted network. It’s more of a nuisance attack than anything – even though DoS attacks can, under the right circumstances, result in financial losses as networks and services become unavailable during the attack.
During the attack, Twitter posted this message on their web site:
“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack,” wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. “Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.”
