Since yesterday’s DDoS attack against Facebook, Twitter and numerous other websites, one of the most affected of them all has been Twitter, who still hasn’t been able to recover completely from the cyber strike. As of now, Twitter is still in defensive mode, thereby thwarting any other such attacks. But, this defensive posture is creating great amount of inconvenience for Twitter users, as many Twitter applications aren’t able to work in tandem with the Twitter API. It has led to the situation, where many users are not able to use Twitter via text messages.
In a statement on the official Twitter Blog, Biz Stone (Co-founder, Twitter) said,
“In the past 24 hours, we’ve been contending with a variety of attacks that continue to change in nature and intensity. We’re working to restore access to apps built on the Twitter platform that were affected by defensive measures—there was some overcompensation on our part as we tune our system to deal with this scale of attack.
The ongoing, massively coordinated attacks on Twitter this week appear to have been geopolitical in motivation. However, we don’t feel it’s appropriate to engage in speculative discussion about these motivations. The open exchange of information can have a positive impact globally and our job is to keep Twitter services running reliably to the best of our ability.
As a reminder, no data or personal information of any kind has been compromised. Denial of Service attacks are a known quantity on the web and they are not going away any time soon. Nevertheless, we can and will improve system response to these assaults such that they don’t interfere with our normal, everyday Twittering.”
Facebook on the other hand, seems to have recovered completely and is operating without any glitches. In a statement, Facebook officials said,
“Yesterday’s attack appears to be directed at an individual who has a presence on a number of sites, rather than the sites themselves. Specifically, the person is an activist blogger and a botnet was directed to request his pages at such a rate that it impacted service for other users. We’ve isolated the issue and almost all of our users are able to enjoy the normal Facebook experience.”
Almost all the websites who suffered this attack are back online and it has been observed that the DDoS strike wasn’t directed to disrupt the services of the websites, instead it was initiated against a lone blogger who goes by the name “Cyxymu.” This individual has accounts on various social networking websites, and has been criticizing the Russian government for its military operations in South Ossetia.
A prominent blogger, Evgeny Morozov has infact, termed Cyxymu as the very first ‘digital refugee‘, as this is the second DDoS attack Cyxymu has faced. Last year also, a similar attack was initiated against this individual his LiveJournal and WordPress Blogs websites.
Via Business Insider.
