Massive DDoS Attack On Twitter: Russian and Georgia Suspicion

This was written by Brynn Koeppen on Friday, August 7, 2009, 16:00.

Twitter was briefly shut down Thursday morning due to a massive denial-of-service attack (DDoS). The hacker/hackers are unknown, suggested perpetrators  have ranged from tech savvy individuals to Russian or Georgian sympathizers. The attack on Thursday marks exactly one year since the Russian-Georgia conflict. 

Similar attacks were found in LiveJournal, another social networking site. Facebook is “looking into” the similarities between attacks it experienced on Thursday morning and Twitter attacks.  Thankfully, Twitter was up and running by Thursday afternoon. 

Biz Stone released a statement on Twitter’s website describing the virus as, ”appears to be a single, massively coordinated attack.” Stone also spoke of the malicious Twitter attack of after the incident. “On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users.”