An Attack Takes Twitter Offline
Posted on August 6, 2009 |
Twitter said it experienced an outage for several hours this morning, leaving consumers unable to access the site. In a blog post, the company said the cause was a so-called denial of service attack where hackers flood a company’s server with so much traffic that it makes the service unavailable. Facebook also told Fox News that it was looking into possible problems on its site and trying to see if they were related. Some Facebook users noticed error messages this morning as they tried to access the site.
While Twitter is now up and running again, it’s unclear what the motivation was for the attack. It is clear, though, that other companies frequently experience these Web attacks. “There’s a lot of denial of service attacks against big company Web sites that happen constantly,” says John Kindervag, senior analyst at Forrester Research. Kindervag says that Microsoft, for example, has faced its share of these attacks in the past because hackers have made the software provider a target. We often don’t hear about these attacks, he says, because there are ways to mitigate and defend against them. Sometimes a corporate Web site may simply slow down during such an attack but business can still be conducted, so consumers are not always aware of what’s happening.
Kindervag says it’s likely that a hacker activated a so-called botnet, an army of computers that have been compromised by malicious code. Once activated, these computers can be commanded to attack a particular Web service. Botnets can be rented fairly cheaply on underground Web sites. However, there have also been cases where groups of people have banded together to attack particular companies. “Groups of people getting upset with a particular corporation like a pharmaceutical company will band together and attack the site all at once,” says Dan Holden, product manager of IBM’s X-Force security research lab. In those cases, they are all given software tools that they all activate on their computers at the same time to initiate such an attack.
Still, experts say that it’s unlikely that the motivation for the Twitter attack was financial. Instead, they say it may just be some hacker who wants a little publicity and bragging rights in the hacker community.
