‘Hacktivism’ against blogger was behind Twitter attack
| August 7, 2009 | 3:59 PM
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When a cyberattack took down popular microblogging and social networking site Twitter on Thursday, many observers had the same question: why Twitter? Is there really that much hatred out there for knowing what Ashton Kutcher’s latest antics are?
Today, we learned that Twitter wasn’t the real target of the attack. Instead, politically motivated “hacktivists” were going after one blogger with the user name Cyxymu.
Cyxymu supports Georgia (the country, not the state) in its ongoing conflict with Russia. He told The Guardian that he is certain the order for the attack “came from the Russian government” to silence his criticism.
Thursday’s attack took Twitter offline for a few hours, and its service has been sporadic since as it tries to recover. The hackers also targeted social networking sites Facebook and LiveJournal, as well as Google and YouTube.
Security experts said the attack came in two stages: the first wave was a deluge of spam e-mails sent in Cyxymu’s name and designed to discredit him. The next wave was the denial-of-service campaign that took down Twitter. In this stage, a flood of junk traffic requests were sent to Cyxymu’s personal Twitter page — as well as his Facebook, LiveJournal and YouTube pages — and eventually paralyzed Twitter’s entire site. The other sites withstood the attack better because of differences in the way their networks are set up, but they did experience some problems.
Whether the attack was actually coming from Russia was hard to determine, as the hackers seemed to be using a “botnet” of enslaved computers around the world to do the deed. Security firm McAfee was able to determine that 29 percent of the computers involved in the attack were in Brazil; 9 percent in Turkey; and 8 percent in India.
Regardless of the source, it seems that millions of people were suddenly drawn Thursday into the Russia-Georgia conflict whether they knew it or not. In the months and years to come, let’s hope we can learn to defend ourselves more effectively from becoming “collateral damage” in someone else’s cyberwar.
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cyxymu, facebook, georgia, hacker, russia, twitter
