So what happened today? A combined attack on several major social media services.
Twitter was attacked by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack this morning (eastern time).
(via Arbor Networks)
Facebook was also hit, possibly twice. First, by another DDoS. Second, by a sudden stream of Twitter refugees. How many crossed from microblog to status window, a million?
Livejournal was the third target. According to their status blog, LJ joined in the suffering, with "an ongoing attack against our network and servers."
Desktop apps and services drawing on Twitter or Facebook through APIs also endured outages, as their feeding tubes closed up.
Even Google took hits. YouTube. Nothing too bad. MySpace didn't; ouch. Overall, Biz Stone describes it as
what appears to be a single, massively coordinated attack. As to the motivation behind this event, we prefer not to speculate.
Who could be responsible? We can only speculate at this point. Here are some ideas, and we welcome more:
- Iran. Twitter and Facebook were used by Iranians to share information and organized. Supporters from the rest of the world used the two to help or commiserate. A bit of vengeance might make sense.
- An apolitical group of hackers. This happened a few days after Black Hat, where social media vulnerabilities were discussed. Could there have been one of those very productive hallways conversations? However, such hacks seem to be on the decline.
- A pro-Russian hacker group, targeting just one guy. This chap is not only very pro-Georgian (must've been amazingly, staggeringly pro-Georgian - or he is now), but has accounts on - you guessed it - Twitter, Facebook, and LJ. Maybe the attack team was from Abkhazia.
(thanks to Steve and the manic, twitching stream of Facebook and Twitter commentators)
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