There’s a theory on the distributed denial of service attack that brought Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and, possibly, other popular sites to their knees yesterday. It may have been caused by a rather low-tech sort of attack and may actually have been directed against a single, pro-Georgia blogger:
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.”
Apparently, the attack was caused by a sort of digital judo in which the power of the Internet was directed against itself.
More than anything else I think this may be a cautionary tale about the advisability of depending too heavily on the availability of the Internet at any given point. The idiots we will always have with us.
