http://www.darkreading.co...=219100293

Twitter Under DDoS Attack
Tweets go silent as microblogging social network site gets downed by a distributed denial-of-service attack; Facebook and LiveJournal also reportedly hit

Aug 06, 2009 | 11:25 AM
By Kelly Jackson Higgins
DarkReading

The wildly popular Twitter social network suddenly went dark sometime before 9:30 a.m. EST this morning, and Twitter officials have confirmed the site is under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

"We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly," the Twitter status page post said at around 10:50 a.m., leaving its 20-plus million users unable to post their tweets.

The site was restored a few minutes ago and has been up and down, and Twitter officials say they are still under attack -- and battling it.

"We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a new blog post after the site was restored.

Twitter from time to time experiences server slowdowns and server unavailability in what its community calls the Twitter "fail whale," but nothing as large-scale as this outage.

"This is the first [DDoS] on Twitter I know of. I am sure there have been attempts before," says Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst for IT-Harvest, who also posted a blog on the DDoS this morning.

Facebook users also saw some slowdowns, as Twitter users apparently went to Facebook to find out what was going on with Twitter, Stiennon said in his post.

But a new report says Facebook and LiveJournal have also acknowledged DDoS attacks on their sites as well.

Paul Henry, security and forensics analyst for Lumension Security says Koobface is likely a big part of the equation: "Today's outage is happening at the same time a new version of the Koobface malware has been found in the wild that is using both Twitter and Facebook messages to send invitations that are designed to lure potential victims to fake AV Web pages. The speculation is that the onslaught of bogus messages that are directing users to malicious pages may in fact be overwhelming Twitter," Henry says.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos and a prolific Twitter user, says the outage could affect plenty of businesses that are increasingly using Twitter to communicate with their peers. "This will impact more and more people, and not just the ones standing in line waiting for their coffee [and tweeting]. People use Twitter for work now...and their work day will be disrupted."

The culprit of such a powerful attack is most likely a botnet, experts say.

Cluley says that, meanwhile, the Twitter community can help by checking the security of their own machines. "If you want to your little bit, scan your computer with an updated antivirus and make sure you're properly patched so that you're not passing a DDoS to Twitter or thousands of other companies. That makes good sense," he says.




Wow, I must be one of the affected ones.
[Edited 8/8/09 18:09pm]

What makes me think that this malware that brought down the Twitter and Facebook sites was probably done by one of these birthers? After all, they didn't attack Myspace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, head of NewsCorp and owner of Fox News.

I was just almost about to start a facebook for my business and to help other friends with pr stuff. I'm really hesitant now since it seems people are just hell bent on using it in a harmful way.

Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user http://tr.im/vQEd

A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google's Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial of service attack that led to the site-wide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook executive.

The blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.

"It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard," Kelly said. "We're actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can."

-->Wow, is that what is was all about?

@flipbooks Sorry eveyone, my Seesmic & Twitter keep shutting down and hopefully this message get's through! B

-->Mine still not working.

728huey said:

Seems it was directed at a specific person...(?)
I think that's what they're saying here...

Mine is broken...

what exactly is the premise of the show? I remember seeing a ton of commercials for it once but don't know anything about it.

What? Facebook is working. Is this from today?


Twitter is labia minora anyway.

wildgoldenhoney said:

Oh.