Twitter, Facebook fend off DoS attacks
Published: 2009-08-06
Users looking to update their Twitter feeds or Facebook pages were likely disappointed Thursday morning, as a denial-of-service attack made both services hard to reach.
Around 9 a.m. Eastern Time, the number of responses from micro-blogging service Twitter fell precipitously, reaching a bandwidth of 60 Mbps by 10:40 a.m. ET, according to Arbor Networks, a networking services firm. Twitter had reached nearly 200 Mbps prior to the drop.
The service continued to be impacted Thursday afternoon, reaching a peak of 150 Mbps, about half of its normal peak for that time of day, according to Arbor.
"As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness," Twitter stated on its status blog. "This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can."
Users also complained of issues accessing Facebook. The service confirmed midday on Thursday that, it too, had suffered a denial-of-service attack.
"You may have had trouble accessing Facebook earlier today because of network issues related to an apparent distributed denial-of-service attack," the social network stated on its own Facebook page. "We have restored full access for most people. We’ll keep monitoring the situation to make sure you have the reliable experience you expect from us."
--------------
"DoS" redirects here. For other uses, see DOS (disambiguation).
DDoS Stacheldraht Attack diagram.
A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers.
One common method of attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.
Denial-of-service attacks are considered violations of the IAB's Internet Proper Use Policy, and also violate the Acceptable Use Policies of virtually all Internet Service Providers. They also commonly constitute violations of the laws of individual nations.[1]
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The wildly popular micro-blogging site Twitter went offline Thursday after a malicious cyber-attack on its systems, the company said.
Twitter was down for more than two hours before engineers at the California firm were able to get it back online with a warning at the website that "we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack."
"On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack," Twitter executive Biz Stone said in an official company blog.
"Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users," he said.
----------
NEW YORK - A hacker attack Thursday shut down the fast-growing messaging service Twitter, and Facebook also said it was looking into possible site problems.
Twitter said in its status blog Thursday that it was "defending against a denial-of-service attack," in which hackers command scores of computers to a single site at the same time, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through.
For Twitter users, the outage meant no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter is down.
Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here
The Twitter outage began at about 9 a.m. ET, said Ken Godskind, chief strategy officer at Web performance monitoring company AlertSite.
The site still had lingering access problems midday (local time), though both Twitter and Facebook seemed to be functioning at least intermittently, giving cubicle-bound social media addicts a collective sigh of relief.
Allison Koski, a public-relations manager in Manhattan, said she felt "completely lost" without Twitter.
"I had to Google search Twitter to find out what was going on, when normally my Twitter feed gives me all the breaking news I need," Koski said.
Incidentally, Facebook also seemed to be experiencing problems. Company spokeswoman Brandee Barker said the company was looking into it and would have an update "as soon as possible."
Technology business analyst Shelly Palmer told AP Radio that denial-of-service attacks are a reality of the information age.
"People tend to want to take sites that are very public and go after them," said Palmer, managing director of Advanced Media Ventures Group. "In fact you'd be surprised how many sites for major companies are really attacked on a daily basis. This is a crime, it's a real crime and it should be treated that way."
Earlier this week, Gawker Media, which owns the eponymous media commentary blog and other sites, was also attacked. In a blog post, Gawker said Tuesday it was attacked by "dastardly hackers," leading to server problems that caused network-wide outages Sunday and Monday. It was not immediately clear whether those attacks were related to Twitter's.
-----
Twitter vanishes from the web in malicious cyber-attack that 'could have been the work of a teenager in their bedroom'
By Dan Newling
Last updated at 1:12 AM on 07th August 2009
Twitter went offline this afternoon following a malicious attack
Twitter was taken offline temporarily yesterday after it fell victim to a 'malicious' cyber attack.
The free micro-blogging service, which has 2.4million users in Britain sending brief messages known as tweets, ceased functioning at around 3pm.
An attack could have been the work of a teenager in their bedroom, an expert said.
Colin Sweetman, who provides internet technology and digital media advice through his company E-Volutionary.net, said such attacks were very common.
He said: "It's probably the most common form of attack on a website because you don't need to be particularly bright to have a go at it. It's relatively unsophisticated.
"Quite often it's a 14 or 15-year-old or a university kid, not a skilled programmer, just someone with a bit of computer knowledge and nothing better to do with their time.he said.
"Normally systems are pretty well protected to handle that kind of thing but it does happen."
Such attacks could be perpetrated from a single location, such as a teenager's bedroom,
Facebook also said it was "looking into" possible problems with the site, which was down temporarily today too.
A message posted on the Twitter blog said: "Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways and, in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users.
"'We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate."
The statement was posted on Twitter's official blog.
It's not clear when the outage began, but it appears to have started mid-morning Eastern time, or around 3pm GMT.
An update on Twitter's status page - at 4.45pm this evening - said the site was 'back up', and American commentators said they could access the site.
A typical 'distributed denial of service' attack is where those responsible infiltrate hundreds or thousands of computers with a virus, which then orders each computer to repeatedly 'visit' the website at a certain time.
This can caused hundreds of thousands of extra visits a second, overloading even the most well-prepared websites.
Major Internet services including Twitter do undergo unplanned outages from time to time because of overcapacity and other problems.
The Twitter blogsite, which confirmed the outage was due to an attack by hackers
The Twitter blogsite, which confirmed the outage was due to a cyber-attack
The service attack may also be affecting businesses, as Twitter has gradually been encouraging companies use a Twitter-based system to send communications.
The microblogging service - which allows users to send short messages to their friends and followers - had about 150,000 users in Britain in May 2008 but now boasts 2.6million - a leap of 1,679 per cent.
Kutcher
Big fans: Ashton Kutcher and wife Demi Moore held a race against news corporation CNN to secure a million followers on Twitter - and the celebrities won
Championed by a range of celebrities such as Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and Demi Moore, who share their thoughts - however mundane - with the world via their 'Tweets', or Twitter messages, it has also developed a reputation for breaking news.
It played a key role in delivering the first reports of the ditching of a passenger plane in the Hudson River in January, and also the recent riots following the Iranian election.
It hit the news again last month when Tory leader David Cameron revealed he was not a fan of Twitter during a radio interview, but was criticised for expressing himself in overly colourful language.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1204795/Twitter-vanishes-web-malicious-cyber-attack-work-teenager-bedroom.html#ixzz0NSDQOmSy
No comments:
Post a Comment