A pro-Georgian Blogger was the target of a co-ordinated hacker attack that resulted in Twitter going offline for 2 hours last week. The blogger, known online as Cyxymu, said he was targeted for “telling the truth about the Russian-Georgian war”, and how now asked Russian President Mr Medvedev to find the culprits. As well as […]
A pro-Georgian Blogger was the target of a co-ordinated hacker attack that resulted in Twitter going offline for 2 hours last week. The blogger, known online as Cyxymu, said he was targeted for “telling the truth about the Russian-Georgian war”, and how now asked Russian President Mr Medvedev to find the culprits. As well as Twitter and Facebook, search giant Google and blogging platform LiveJournal – all sites where the blogger holds accounts – were also affected last Thursday (6th August) by the Denial-of-Service (DOS) attack. Security experts at Facebook confirmed that the attack was directed at an individual “rather than the sites themselves”.
“A botnet was directed to request his pages at such a rate that it impacted service for other users,” the spokesperson said.
Botnets are networks of computers under the control of hackers. DOS attacks often involve a company’s servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.
A spam campaign, containing links to Cyxymu pages on the various sites, coincided with and compounded the attack. Although Facebook was back up and running within hours, Twitter continued to feel the effects into the weekend whilst LiveJournal has said it has continued to be attacked.
11/08/2009
