Security experts believe that the DDoS that took down Twitter originated in Russia.
It sounds like the plot of a really weird James Bond movie, but the distributed denial of service attack that targeted Twitter and Facebook was apparently the work of Russian hackers.
According to a spokesperson for Facebook a Georgian blogger – from the country, not the state – known as Cyxymu was the target of the attacks which also included the site LiveJournal and YouTube.
“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting [Cyxymu] to keep his voice from being heard,” said Max Kelly, a senior security adviser at Facebook. “We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”
“I write the truth about the Russian-Georgian war and somebody did not like these truths – these people in Russia,” Cyxymu – real name Georgy – told BBC News.”I don’t know which people,” adding, “it’s a big surprise to me that my blog has meant that 250m people have not been able to enter Facebook.”
Graham Cluley, of security firm Sophos, said that there is no reason to believe that this is the work of the Russian government: “It was almost certainly an individual who took objection to his blogs,” he said, “they took internet vigilantism into their own hands to try to blast him off the web, but in the process blasted Twitter off instead.”
Source: The Telegraph and BBC
Published: Aug 8, 2009 01:38 pm