Twitter Tweety Killed, Facebook ripped and the Social Network Drowned

The two biggies of the Social Network seemed to cripple as both Twitter and Facebook faced outage of services which ultimately came up to be a DDoS attack from an unidentified source. The attack was carried out at some 10 AM Eastern Time. This attack also followed on other sites such as LiveJournal and recently Youtube is reported to have the same slowdown. Although Youtube has not stated any of its service down.

As on Twitter Status Blog, Twitter reported the problem while tweeters waited long to their favorite social network. The outage has been reported to be the longest stretching whole 2 hours which in Online terms is quite a long time!

The blogosphere and other social networks were filled with disappointed Tweeters reaching out for alternatives and with cries for the outage of the service.

Twitter then reported to be "defending against a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack" that was causing the outage.

After it was over with Twitter came a news about Facebook facing the same problem. Worldwide Facebook returned Network errors with its service increasing the disappointment in people. After all we love to be socially connected of which facebook is an indispensable part.

After the Attack was succesfully defended, Facebook Officials stated the same outage to be a DDoS of which the source is still to be tracked.

But what caused this chaos in the Social Network world? Some blogs have reported the source of attack to be related to the Georgia Russia Crisis and that the attack was organized to silence one man reported to be "cyxymu" as on Twitter.

In an interview, Facebook's chief security officer Max Kelly told CNET.com, “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.”

Google is quoted as saying, “We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by a DOS attack this morning, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack. Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services.”

The claims back up earlier reports in the New York Times that Thursday’s attack was sparked by the conflict between Russia and Georgia. The aim was to take down Cyxymu’s accounts, particularly the LiveJournal blog where he posted about the crisis. While Google’s sites held up to the barrage, Twitter and LiveJournal proved less robust.

While DDoS attacks are notoriously hard to defend against, it’s clear that Twitter was far less equipped to cope with such an attack: no doubt they’ll be taking a closer look at how such issues could be handled in the future.

Another blog post also reported a leading security expert as stating that this attack was not a normal DDoS that we usually see with a botnet and malware and trojan infected computers supporting the attack. Rather this was an organized attack.
he security expert spoke with The New York Times and gave his assessment of the situation:

Bill Woodcock, a research director of the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit technical organization that tracks Internet traffic, said Thursday’s attack was an extension of the conflict between Russia and Georgia. It was not clear who initiated the attack, he said, but likely “one side put up propaganda, the other side figured this out and is attacking them.”

Instead of using a botnet, or a network of thousands of malware-infected personal computers to flood a site with traffic, Mr. Woodcock said this particular attack consisted of a wave of spam e-mail messages, which began infiltrating Twitter and other sites at 10:25 a.m. Eastern time. “It’s a vast increase in traffic that creates the denial-of-service,” he said.

YouTube and LiveJournal were also affected, Mr. Woodcock said, although “Twitter was definitely hit the hardest.” YouTube said it had not noticed any problems with its service.

Reference from: Mashable

Whatever happened to the Social World has been a sort of security lessons to this network and if the attack was related to cyber warfare, then we could be seeing a lot more of this. Still, it’s tough to understand how these social media sites would be of any strategic value to either Russia or Georgia. Today’s events are certainly getting even more complicated, though.