A "single, massively coordinated attack" appears to have been the cause of problems experienced by users of Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Blogger yesterday. CNet news is reporting that a pro-Georgian blogger with accounts on all 4 of these sites was the primary target of a denial of service attack that affected traffic to the sites for much of the day Wednesday.
In a post on the official Twitter Blog, Biz Stone writes "Please note that no user data was compromised in this attack. This activity is about saturating a service with so many requests that it cannot respond to legitimate requests thereby denying service to intended customers or users.
We've worked hard to achieve technical stability and we're proud of our Engineering and Operations teams. Nevertheless, today's massive, globally distributed attack was a reminder that there's still lots of work ahead."
Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.
In a post on the official Twitter Blog, Biz Stone writes "Please note that no user data was compromised in this attack. This activity is about saturating a service with so many requests that it cannot respond to legitimate requests thereby denying service to intended customers or users.
We've worked hard to achieve technical stability and we're proud of our Engineering and Operations teams. Nevertheless, today's massive, globally distributed attack was a reminder that there's still lots of work ahead."
Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.
"It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him (the pro Georgian blogger Cyxymu) to keep his voice from being heard," Kelly said. "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."
