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Loading ...The plot thickens around yesterdays Twitter DOS attack. As some had suspected, other sites, including Facebook and Livejournal, were also targeted too. A post on the Mashable blog also cites Google as being involved in the investigations. Google are a past master at fending off large scale DDOS attacks, and work well with the Tier one ISPs in controlling them.
A blogger in the Republic of Georgia with the username Cyxymu was the victim, according to Facebook’s chief security officer Max Kelly. Large BotNets - compromised machines around the web under the control of hackers - have been used in vendetta attacks for a number of years, and the motive here may have been to silence a single pro-Georgian blogger.
On-line services and business take note: one unpopular user can easily lead to a large scale attack. A response plan needs to be in place ahead of time - alternative data centres and well established contact points for upstream providers and a mechanism for keeping customers/users up to date with issues. The technical barriers to launching a DDoS attack are very low, with large numbers of unpatched machines still on the Internet, and hacker tool kits circulating the web.
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