Friday, August 07, 2009

No tweets yesterday

Several web sites were attacked yesterday including Twitter, Facebook and Google.

What the attackers did was to flood the servers of the affected sites causing what is termed a denial of service. They do this by setting up what is called a botnet which may comprise hundreds of thousands of computers all trying to access the targeted site at the same time. Anyone then trying to access the site legitimately is denied access as the servers crash.

I doubt if anyone is going to loose sleep about not being able to tweet on Twitter or gossip on Facebook. The loss of Google services though could be a tad more serious especially since Blogger is hosted by Google!

Normally cybercriminals attack sites of companies and then try to blackmail them. It is hard to fathom what the hackers could gain from attacking Facebook and Twitter.

Of course if you live in China these sites are permanently blocked anyway so people there will be blissfully unaware of what was going on.

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