Twitter, Facebook and LiveJounal DDoS attacks targeted single user

7 August 2009 21:37 GMT / By Stuart Miles

More details are starting to emerge as to who was behind the DDoS attacks against Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google on Thursday.

According to reports, the DDoS attacks were aimed at silencing a pro-Georgian blogger who had been critical of Russia's activity in the country since last year.

“Yesterday’s attack appears to be directed at an individual who has a presence on a number of sites, rather than the sites themselves,” Facebook said in a written statement.

“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.”

"The major DDoS campaign which brought Twitter to its knees yesterday (and mildly impacted the likes of Facebook, LiveJournal, Google's Blogger and possibly YouTube service) may have actually set out to silence only one person - an anti-Russian blogger called Cyxymu from Tbilisi." Reported security company Sophos.
On Friday Twitter, the worst affected of the sites, Twitter, confirmed that it was still working to resolve the problem.

"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," said Twitter's Biz Stone on the company blog.

Although not wanting to get into the political elements of what had happened, the founder said that the site will continue to "improve system response to these assaults such that they don't interfere with our normal, everyday Twittering."

Via: sophos.com

Full tags

Software, Online, DDoS, Twitter, Facebook, Google, LiveJournal, Social networking