DDoS Attacks

The Day Social Network Sites Went Down

It seems that the attack was aimed at one specific user, a Georgian anti-Russian blogger known as Cyxymu (name of a town in the Republic of Georgia). The attacks targeted all social network sites where this blogger has a profile - including Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal (where his blog is located) and his YouTube account, in an attempt to keep his voice from being heard. It all happened one day before the anniversary of one year of the beginning of the armed conflict between Russia and Georgia


By GABRIELA ZAGO
from Pelotas, BRAZIL


At August 6th, users noticed something very strange happening to their favorite social networks - some were taking longer to load, others were not even opening. Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and YouTube started the day fighting off DDoS attacks directed to these sites. While Facebook and YouTube remained partially up, with just a few issues on posting new content or loading certain pages, Twitter and LiveJournal were totally down for a few hours.

As soon as Twitter identified the problem and started to get back to function, DDoS emerged as a Trending Topic. Soon after, another tag emerged as a Trend: #whentwitterwasdown, and users started to say what they did while Twitter website was not working.

At Facebook, things were not so better. Although the site wasn't totally down, developers reported a loss of around 75% of the traffic during the day due to slow loadings and timeouts.

But why did all those attacks happened? As Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNet News, it seems that the attack was aimed at one specific user, a Georgian anti-Russian blogger known as Cyxymu (name of a town in the Republic of Georgia). The attacks targeted all social network sites where this blogger has a profile - including Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal (where his blog is located) and his YouTube account, in an attempt to keep his voice from being heard. It all happened one day before the anniversary of one year of the beginning of the armed conflict between Russia and Georgia. The DDoS attack was so successful that it took down not just his profiles but whole websites, such as what happened to Twitter.

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a primitive kind of attack by which it is attempted to access a web service several times at once, more times than the service is capable of dealing with, flooding the system with a lot of traffic. As a result, the website attacked can stop responding to legitimate requests and be brought down. It is usually performed automatically by a botnet - the attacker uses malicious code installed on several computers in order to direct them to a single target. This is made in order to have a greater effect than it is possible using a single machine. According to The Register, however, what happened on August 6th was not a botnet-style attack, but actually a joejob. Joejobs are spam e-mail messages designed to induce someone to click on a link in order to harm the site being linked to. If several people click on the link, it may end up harming the website.


(Published: 20.08.2009.)