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Twitter, Facebook Suffer With DDoS Attack
Techtree News Staff, Aug 07, 2009 1656 hrs ISTPopular social networks suffer outage with age old Denial of Service attack
Yesterday, two major social networks Twitter and Facebook suffered from Denial of Service attacks. Millions of Twitter users were unable to access the micro-blogging site since it was reportedly down. Soon, the Twitter team updated that it was defending against a DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack. The DDoS attack occurs when a large number of requests are sent masked as legitimate ones and make the service non-functional.
Max Kelly, chief security officer of Facebook, told CNET that the profile of a Georgian blogger named Cyxymu's Twitter, Facebook, Live Journal and Blogger was targeted which resulted into Twitter outage, eventually affecting other sites. All the services are now restored while Twitter still suffers from hiccups and latencies.
Last night's Twitter outage might not have bothered many but the affected sites did bother millions of users. Biz Stone, Twitter Co-Founder, updated on the official Twitter blog that the site has been working closely with the companies and services affected by the 'massively coordinated' attack. Twitter still suffers from latencies due to which several users are unable to post or follow other users.
It's evidential that this was massively co-ordinated attack in which large number of machines might have been used as botnets. Kelly said, "It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. 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." So, it's unlikely that a single machine managed to create this havoc.
Facebook and Google have been able to minimize the impact of the DDoS attack on the respective sites. Nevertheless, it's not the first time loop hole in Twitter's code was exploited. The 17-year old Mikeyy Mooney did try to warn Twitter about the holes which were taken care of later. Stone assured that no user data was compromised in this attack.
Though Twitter is live and functional now, just hold your patience till it gets completely restored. Meanwhile, you can enjoy reading what Twitter users did when Twitter was down.
Max Kelly, chief security officer of Facebook, told CNET that the profile of a Georgian blogger named Cyxymu's Twitter, Facebook, Live Journal and Blogger was targeted which resulted into Twitter outage, eventually affecting other sites. All the services are now restored while Twitter still suffers from hiccups and latencies.
Last night's Twitter outage might not have bothered many but the affected sites did bother millions of users. Biz Stone, Twitter Co-Founder, updated on the official Twitter blog that the site has been working closely with the companies and services affected by the 'massively coordinated' attack. Twitter still suffers from latencies due to which several users are unable to post or follow other users.
It's evidential that this was massively co-ordinated attack in which large number of machines might have been used as botnets. Kelly said, "It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. 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." So, it's unlikely that a single machine managed to create this havoc.
Facebook and Google have been able to minimize the impact of the DDoS attack on the respective sites. Nevertheless, it's not the first time loop hole in Twitter's code was exploited. The 17-year old Mikeyy Mooney did try to warn Twitter about the holes which were taken care of later. Stone assured that no user data was compromised in this attack.
Though Twitter is live and functional now, just hold your patience till it gets completely restored. Meanwhile, you can enjoy reading what Twitter users did when Twitter was down.
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,Skopje, on Aug 07, 2009 09:06 PM
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