abirdtold.me

It was the big social media story of the week; on Thursday, TwitterTwitter went down due to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. And while Twitter was the most visible target, FacebookFacebook, GoogleGoogle, and others were also under fire due to a geopolitical attack against one man. It’s been three days since the attacks. Everything’s back to normal, right? No, not exactly. While Twitter, YouTubeYouTube, Livejournal, and others are working again, the attacks are still ongoing. This has resulted in the Twitter API and third party apps being hit hard as the social media company tries to resolve the DDoS crisis… Read on at Mashable.com

TwitterTwitter already gets plenty of press attention, but when it went down yesterday due to a DDoS attack, the news seemed to have unprecedented reach, serving as top story on a number of mainstream news sites for a good part of the day. Why was this such huge news? The cynical onlooker might say that because old media wants to highlight when things go wrong in new media. However, the more realistic answer is that because of how massive sites like FacebookFacebook, Twitter, and even LiveJournal and other impacted services have become, when they go down, it’s a story that impacts tens of millions of people… Read on at Mashable.com

Did Twitter, FacebookFacebook, LiveJournal, YouTubeYouTube, Google Sites and GoogleGoogle’s Bloggerblogger all get attacked yesterday to silence one man? According to the testimony of a Facebook executive, they did. A blogger in the Republic of Georgia with the username Cyxymu was the victim, according to Facebook’s chief security officer Max Kelly. The claims cement earlier reports that social networking sites have been dragged into the Georgia-Russia crisis, leading to the first simultaneous attack on the largest social media sites… Read on at Mashable.com

The social media world is under attack. Earlier this morning, TwitterTwitter acknowledged that its downtime was the result of a malicious Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS), and now FacebookFacebook tells us that their intermittent site problems are also the result of DDoS activity. According to a Facebook spokesperson “Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users. No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users. We’re continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.” Read on at Mashable.com

This morning civilization almost ground to a halt as TwitterTwitter was hit with a DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service Attack and went down for over two hours, with intermittent outages continuing even as they got the situation more under control. So what exactly is a DDoS attack? The goal of any Denial of Service is to take out a specific online resource and make it unavailable to its users. Targets are typically hugely popular destinations with a lot to lose, and with Twitter’s explosive growth comes its emergence as a juicy target for hackers and miscellaneous enemies or pranksters. DDoS attacks often involve sending a flood of external communication requests to the site that at first glance may appear just like legitimate traffic. The intent is to overwhelm the service’s resources to such a degree that it can’t respond to real requests for real users, effectively rendering the site unreachable or so slow to respond as to be impossible to use for some period of time… Read on at Mashable.com