Twitter Attacked!
Tweeting on the popular social networking site Twitter came to an unexpected halt on Thursday, when unknown hackers launched a massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack that crippled the popular service for several hours. Facebook was also affected, but not as severely. Twitter’s rapid growth in popularity over the last year probably was a factor in the attack. On the Internet, visibility usually translates to vulnerability.
Details are still sketchy, but some suggest that the attack was launched from one of several well known, massive illegal botnets scattered around the globe. These are composed of millions of infected “zombie” PCs running botnet client software — and in most cases, the owners of these compromised machines are probably unaware they’re being used to conduct criminal activities. Some indications are that the attack was political in nature. According to an initial analysis, it “may have been related to the ongoing political conflict between Russia and Georgia.” The attack “started with hackers using a botnet to send a flurry of spam e-mail messages that contained links to pages on Twitter, Facebook and other sites written by a single pro-Abkhazia activist.”
The question is which side the hackers were on. As one researcher noted, “it’s hard to immediately tell whether it was a case of hackers trying to punish the sites for publishing views they disagree with, or if they were directing traffic to the sites out of sympathy for the activist’s message.”
While I’m not one to point fingers, I will suggest that anyone who found frustration in this event might want to consider their own possible role in it. Anyone who’s running an unpatched, unprotected system lacking current antivirus/anti-malware software and a decent firewall could be the not-so-proud owner of a zombie PC. Thus, your own machine may have been participating in the DDoS attack even as you were complaining about Twitter’s unavailability.
Patch your systems. Protect them properly. Spend the $50 for a decent malware detection tool and signature subscription. Otherwise, you might be helping take down the very sites you enjoy using. Think about it.