Hackers Attack on Twitter and Facebook
By Umer Kayani on Aug 10, 2009
NEW YORK, 6th August 2009; On Thursday a hacker attack resulted in a shut down of two fast-growing social networking sites; Twitter and Facebook. In a status blog, Twitter announced that it had come under denial-of-service attack by malicious spammers. Brandee Barker, the spokeswoman for Facebook said that they were not very sure of what exactly had transpired but were looking into the issue with the urgency it deserves.
According to Ken Godskind, the Chief Strategy Officer of Alertsite, a web performance monitoring company, the outage at Twitter started at around 9am EDT (1300 GMT) although the problem is said to have started long before the outcry. This meant that a lot of Twitter users were in an inconvenienced position as users could not tweet and exchange messages on various topics or even about the Twitter problem.
The problem was still on at midday although by now the two social sites were functioning occasionally. Thus those who have subscribed to both sites could easily shift from one to the other depending on which one was working. Most the users expressed their disappointment and termed their predicament as that of feeling lost or hopeless for not being able to communicate with the rest of the world.
One Twitter subscriber Allison Koski from Manhattan narrated her ordeal, “I had to Google search Twitter to find out what was going on, when normally my Twitter feed gives me all the breaking news I need,’
A technology business analyst Shelly Palmer was quoted on AP Radio saying that hackers are now targeting the public sites as opposed to earlier on when private sites were their main target. Palmer who is also the group’s Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures said that the denial of service has become a major technological crime that should be treated with a lot of seriousness.
Further reports say that earlier on during the week, there was a similar attack but this time on Gawker Media which owns a media commentary blog and this led to massive server problems. But it is not yet clear whether there is a connection between all these attacks.
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August 10th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
Thanks for the great report, i was scared a little when i saw both of them down, was glad when they came up
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also, the attack source was discovered, and target, the target was a Professor, from georgia who wrote about the russia/georgia war, russian hackers Did all this to appear as he’s the origin, since the professor articles are on the internet they spammed all the sites he was in, myspace etc, you should add that to the the article