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Twitter, Facebook and Google In Botnet Attack- But Was It Really The Russian?

By Andrew Redfern @ 7th August 2009 1:53 pm

Internet users around the globe yesterday were left reeling as several top sites suffered from Denial of Service or severely reduced performance. Sites including Google, Live Journal, Facebook and Twitter all suffered in what has been described as a “Massive and Sustained Attack”.

Rumours are circulating throughout the internet as to the origination of the attack. Already the finger has been pointed at Russian in an added dimension to the Russian- Georgian conflict. The specific attack was aimed at a Pro Georgia blogger called Cyxymu who had accounts with all the sites targeted in the attack. Georgia and Russia had a “five day war” last year resulting in a stand-off between the two countries, tensions have remained high between the two ever since.

Blogger site Live Journal, have claimed to have battled through the attack and was least affected. The nature of the attack was a “Denial of Service” attack, targeting the accounts of Cyxymu across several blog and social network sites. Typically this is achieved by hackers taking control of infected machines and in unison bombarding servers with requests for internet pages. If the group of infected machines (Botnet) is large enough, then they will succeed in overwhelming the server.

Twitter have gone on record to say “Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack.”

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