Cheshire Cat Photo Blog(...said the Cat: 'we're all mad here....')

Twits of unknown social class (other than “low-life,” or maybe they are members of a “classless society” ) launched a DoS  (Denial of Service) attack against Twitter today that shut down the site for about two hours this morning. Glitches occurred in the sites Facebook and LiveJournal as well (and see BELOW)!

(Yesterday evening, I noticed that a post to Twitter did not show up in my Facebook pages, as I have configured to occur. [Who knows why? ])

Twitter’s site went down around 9:30 AM EDT and was back online by about 11:30 AM EDT. In June, the Twitter site had 44 million unique visitors, according to comScore, a Web tracking firm.

This afternoon, CNET reported that the Twitter and Facbook attack targeted a single user, a blogger with the account name “Cyxymu” (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia). Cyxymu had accounts on all of the different sites (Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google’s Blogger and YouTube) that were attacked at the same time, according to Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook in talking with CNET News.

The CNET article states that today’s was the first coordinated attack on the sites, and that the attack was a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), as well as an email spam attack that spoofed Cyxymu as the sender.

(Note added 8:19 PM PDT August 6, 2009: A “random” thought – maybe NEXT time these folks could just agree to a pistol duel and all of the millions of the rest of us could “referee” and stand out of the “line-of-fire.” It looks like Twitter is STILL having problems.)

(Note added August 8, 2009: CNN has this article with some comments about folks feeling “jittery” and “naked” during the Twitter outage. My comments are that folks should feel much more “naked” when Twitter and other social media sites are OPERATING, because folks are much more “exposed.” As for people being “jittery,” my reaction is to tell them to quit whining and “get a life.” As one of my former directors, a former Green Beret with three tours of Vietnam used to say during a business “crisis,” “Nobody has died here.” What would these people do when a major earthquake or tsunami hits? You know, something from “real life…!” Also, the targeted Cyxymu is now blaming the Russian KGB for the attack. My earlier statement about a pistol duel with a lot less “collateral damage” still stands.)

(Note added August 12, 2009: Some twits attacked Twitter again! Knock it off guys, you’ve proved your point.)

-Bill at Cheshire Cat Photo™

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