Twitter under denial-of-service attack

Jake Widman
Thursday, 06 August 2009 22:33

Business IT - Technology

Left without Twitter, tweeters turned elsewhere.

According to Richard Stiennon's ThreatChaos blog, the flood of people turning to Facebook to find out what was wrong with Twitter caused slowdowns on that service as well.

Security analyst Stiennon told DarkReading that this was the first successful denial-of-service attack on Twitter that he knew of, though he was sure there had been other attempts.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos, raised on his blog the effect on businesses who have taken to Twitter to communicate with their customers.

Cluley also wondered what the motivation was: "Why would someone want to attack Twitter? I can't imagine it's a commercial competitor of theirs, but it could be someone with a political or financial motivation (blackmail?), or a teenager in a back bedroom with access to an awfully large botnet."

As of this post, Twitter was working for this writer, and the Twitter status blog hadn't been updated since the warning of slow service.

Followup: I spoke too soon. The attempt to send a tweet about this article shows no signs of succeeding, a couple of minutes after clicking the Update button.