August 7th, 2009
Did Russians attack Twitter over pro-Georgian blogger?
It was one year ago today that Russia invaded Georgia over the South Ossetia region. Yesterday someone unleashed a massive botnet DDOS attack on Twitter, Facebook and Google. The crash of Twitter under this onslaught was the big story yesterday. Now it seems the whole thing was an attack on one person - a pro-Georgian user with the screen name Cyxymu.
[The] attack appears to be directed at an individual who has a presence on a number of sites, rather than the sites themselves,” a Facebook spokesman told BBC News. “Specifically, the person is an activist blogger and a botnet was directed to request his pages at such a rate that it impacted service for other users.”
No one seems to know who launched the attack but Cyxymu told the Guardian:
Maybe it was carried out by ordinary hackers but I’m certain the order came from the Russian government.
Cnet and other sites quote Facebook security chief Max Kelly, who said:
“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard,” Kelly said. “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.”
“You have to ask who would benefit the most from doing this and think about what those people are doing and the disregard for the rest of the users and the Internet.”
As to the whether it was the Russian government (no stranger to cyberwar activities), Kelly said:
The people who are coordinating this attack, the criminals, are definitely determined and using a lot of resources. If they’re asking our infrastructure to generate hundreds of pages a second, that’s a lot of pages our users can’t see.
