Twitter and Facebook DoS attack

I’m sure everyone knows by now that Twitter and Facebook both suffered from a Denial of Service (DoS) attack yesterday.  For those who don’t know what that means, a DoS attack is any kind of malicious attack against a server or service that causes that server to become unavailable.  In it’s simplest form a DoS will make so many page requests on a web server that the server can’t handle them all.  It would be like a web server that could handl 100,000 users at once suddenly got hit by 1,000,000 users.  The web server can’t handle that much traffic so it slows down to a halt.  There are other methods of initiating a DoS depending on the target service you are attacking, but you should get the point.

Now concerning yesterday’s attack, today it is being reported that it was not a general DoS attack against Twitter and Facebook, but a specific target against a single user.  The user known as ‘Cyxymu’ is a well-known anti-Russion Georgian political blogger.  It appears the attacks yesterday were targetted against this user and his various online methods of being heard.  His Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal accounts were all the the targets for this attack.  The goal was to prevent this one person’s voice from being heard.  The result of the attack was to either shutdown or seriously hamper these services for everyone.

Now that all this is known, I think the attack, if its goal was to silence Cyxymu’s voice, has been counterproductive.  Now that every news site on the Internet is reporting the attack was against Cyxymu, I expect followers of this user to increase significantly.

Honestly, if I were a political activist and I wanted to get my message out, I might plan an attack against myself for this very reason.  So who’s really behind this attack?  I guess we’ll find out eventually.