A few months ago, we ran a story about the Twitpocalypse, the end of the Twitter world as we knew it. It didn’t occur when expected, but this week’s series of Twitter attacks has made it feel close.Â
The New York Times BITS blog reported, “Twitter, the popular microblogging service, was crippled Thursday morning by a denial-of-service attack. The extended silence in a normally noisy Twitterworld began around 9 a.m. Twitter later posted a note to its status update page saying the site had been slowed to a standstill by an attack.” They went on to explain that a denial-of-service attack involves thousands of malware-infected home PCs that are directed to flood a targeted site with junk traffic. Once the site is overwhelmed, legitimate visitors cannot access the service.
Later posts to the BITS blog explain that the Twitter attack came in two waves. It seemed the point was to silence a blogger’s criticism on the behavior of Russia in the conflict over the South Ossetia region in Georgia, which began a year ago on Friday. The technique they used was intended to discredit the blogger by making it appear as though he was the source of a large amount of junk e-mails, causing all of his messages to be filtered out.
Saturday’s BITS blog gave more information as the attacks continued to keep people from Tweeting.
Only time will tell if we’ve become so attached to our real-time messaging that a few days without service will cause us problems. While Twitter was the only service that could get news out from Iran after their election a few months ago, it seems cyber-bad-guys have found ways to silence other dissenters with internet speed.
Tags: Internet Speed, Real-Time, Twitter