8/7/09

Twitter and Facebook Targeted in Web Attack

Source: http://www.marketingvox.com/twitter-and-facebook-targeted-in-web-attack- 044808/?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=mv&utm_medium=textlink

Denial-of-service attacks hit popular social networking sites Twitter,

LiveJournal and Facebook on Thursday, which resulted in Twitter

being down for at least two hours.

For its part, Facebook reported that an attack hit them at the same time,

but was able to successfully defend against it without

any service interruption.

Twitter and Facebook say that no user data was compromised

in the event.

While no one has yet claimed responsibility,

the origination of the attack is said to have come

from Russia or Georgia.

While DOS attacks are common for many sites, this is

the first time one was able to have such a noticeable effect

on Twitter, said by many to be vulnerable to just such a thing.

In many cases, hackers are not necessarily looking

to exploit sites for illegal purposes, but others do.

DOS attacks are part of the larger problem of Hacker Commerce,

or H*Commerce, a multi-billion dollar industry where hackers

compromise personal and business data for illegal gain,

which in turn costs businesses time and money

to have to defend against.

As noted in The Globe and Mail, Shelly Palmer,

managing director of Advanced Media Ventures Group,

shares the feeling held by many that any DOS should

be treated more seriously.

"People tend to want to take sites that are very public and

go after them.

In fact you'd be surprised how many sites for

major companies are really attacked on a daily basis.

This is a crime, it's a real crime and it should

be treated that way." llegal or not,

Twitter's vulnerabilities were on display for the world

to see as the popular microblogging site continues

its upward growth in terms of the number of users,

estimated to now be over 44 million.

The site has been down before, but those past outages

were usually server-related.

This is the first time it's been down to this extent

due to malicious activity.

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