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.
No comments:
Post a Comment