The denial-of-service attacks that shut down Twitter globally for a few hours and disrupted Facebook last week were intended to be surgical strikes against a small-time blogger espousing anti-Russian sentiments, tech security researchers say.
The site still seems to be slow for the occasional user. Last week the site was under massive distribute denial-of-service (DDos) attack, which made sure the site went down for a couple of hours. It did come back up though. However, Twitter just doesn?t ?feel? the same ever since it?s been back up.
In fact, on Saturday, people were still complaining about the site being extremely slow. While there were some reports of the attack continuing many of the issues seems to have been caused by Twitter?s own steps to mitigate the problems. Users hooked on to third party tools for updating and reading tweets seem to be particularly hit as Twitter?s measures to ?lessen? the impact of the attacks meant that many of these programs were unable to access Twitter?s API (Application Programming Interface).
Now that the weekend has passed, Twitter still seems to be slow for the occasional user. It seems either Twitter is upgrading its defense mechanism or the attack has left some kind of a dent that Twitter is still trying to fix. Anyway, it seems the most affected users still seem to be users who are dependent on third party twitter clients or people using SMS for tweeting their updates. On the other hand, all the other sites that too had faced the attacks seem to be back on their feet.
Twitter and Facebook suffered service problems from hacker attacks raising speculation about a coordinated campaign against the world?s most popular online social networks. The attacks, which came a month after the White House website was targeted in a similar online assault, left millions unable to carry out daily routines that have assumed an increasingly central part of their lives. The incidents also underscored the vulnerability of fast-growing Internet social networking sites that have been heralded as powerful new political tools to counter censorship and authoritarianism.
Twitter, which allows people to broadcast short, 140-character text messages over the Internet, became a key form of communication in Iran amid the protests and clampdown that followed the country?s disputed June elections.
A Facebook executive said Thursday?s cyber attacks were aimed at a Georgian blogger with accounts at the various affected sites, according to a report on technology news site CNET.
Members of Facebook, the world?s largest Internet social network with more than 250 million active users, saw delays logging in and posting to their online profiles. Like Twitter, Facebook said the problems appeared to stem from a so-called denial of service attack, a technique in which hackers overwhelm a website?s servers with communications requests.
Once access to Twitter had been restored, many of the site?s users posted short messages lamenting the disturbance. ?now I know Im addicted to Twitter…I wasnt rite all day,? Twitter user hotlilNINAposted.
Speculation swirled on the Internet that other sites, including Google, had also come under attack, after relatively lesser-known site LiveJournal said it, too, had been targeted by hackers on Thursday. But those rumors could not be confirmed.