Twitter DDoS

Two days ago the social networking website, Twitter experienced a massive DDoS (denial of service) attack that took down the website and forced the millions of people that use the service unable to tweet.

A DDoS attack is a means of forcing a website down by delivering more traffic than they can handle, which disallows people who want to use the website for legitimate reasons to do so.
The DDoS attack that caused Twitter’s outage was traced back to a specific profile on Twitter; that of a Georgia supporter called ‘Cyxymu’, who was tweeting in support of Georgia in the Russia/Georgia conflict.

The attack was reportedly coming from computers around the globe, and not only hit Twitter but also other social networking websites such as Facebook and Livejournal, where ‘Cyxymu’ also had profiles, causing slowdown and issues.
Twitter is still battling the ongoing DDoS attack, which has led to them having to disable some parts of their API in defence, leaving some third party applications not working for the time being.

It is interesting to note that the profile has grown from 300 followers to about 3,000, a sign of the ‘Streisand effect’, which is where an attempt to censor or remove information from the web backfires and actually makes that information more exposed than it ever would have been if attempts to censor it had not have proceeded in the first place.

The Streisand effect was famously coined after singer Barbra Streisand sued Pictopia.com for $50 million in an attempt to get an aerial photo of her house removed from a freely viewable database of photos of the Californian coastline; which existed to document erosion of said coastline.
The court case backfired, and millions of people have now viewed the photo.

You can view the notorious Twitter profile here: http://twitter.com/cyxymu