Cybercrooks take down Twitter
By Cindy House 
| August 6, 2009 | 11:35 AM
Popular social-networking site Twitter was knocked offline for several hours this morning by online crooks who launched a denial-of-service attack.
In such an attack, a Web site is bombarded with traffic requests that can overload the system and cause it to crash. Usually, these attacks are orchestrated by zombie “botnets” created by malware downloaded on unsuspecting users’ computers through viruses and other nefarious means.
Fellow social-networking site Facebook also apparently was attacked today, but it seemed to be withstanding the onslaught better than Twitter.
This week, the popular Gawker Media sites also were hit with a denial-of-service attack, as were the Web sites of several federal agencies last month.
These types of attacks are hard to trace and are considered rather crude — kind of like using brute force and smashing someone’s car engine to make the vehicle inoperable. They can be effective, however, as the attack on Twitter proves.
They also underscore how vulnerable many of our online systems are to attack. As we become increasingly reliant on the Internet to communicate and conduct business, security experts say we’re likely to see more exploitation of these weaknesses.
And the fight against the hackers took a serious blow with the resignation this week of President Obama’s acting cybersecurity chief, who indicated that she stepped down in part because she wasn’t given the authority to make the changes she felt are needed.
Today, it’s Twitter. Tomorrow, it could be our power grid.
cyberattack, cybersecurity, facebook, hacker, twitter
