Andy Cook Tell 'Em

New sources have discovered that the DDoS attacks yesterday on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, Blogger, and Google have discovered that the attacks were aimed to silence one man. Who is this man? He’s a blogger from the Republic of Georgia with the username Cyxymu. Why would anyone want to silence this specific man? He was blogging about the current conflict between Georgia and Russia. This is the first known simultaneous attack ever on multiple social networking websites.

CNet is quoted as saying,

“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”

Every site had significant downtime except for Google, their response was,

“We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by a DOS attack this morning, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack. Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services.”

All in all, this is an interesting development in the progression of how people want to censor or silence people blogging about political activism.  Similarly to the #iranelection hashtag, this DDoS attack against multiple personal media outlets shows the influence people can have over huge political movements.

Will social networking really change the way the world works?  I definately think so and I believe these developments prove the point.

As we all know, as of this morning Twitter experience about 2 hours of downtime due to a Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The members of the online imageboard community 4chan.org have claimed responsibility although no one knows for sure who did it. Keeping in mind that Twitter has had a multitude of security problems lately this attack proves that it the downtime was not on their end, but caused by someone with malicious intent.

But who has it in for Twitter? Who knows, this attack could have been by anyone or any organization. For now, Twitter needs to beef up security and figure out who did this.

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