Twitter, Facebook DDoS Attack Targeted One User

An anonymous reader writes "A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google's Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial of service attack that led to yesterday's site-wide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on, according to a Facebook executive. The blogger, who uses the account name 'Cyxymu' (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia), had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNet News." Here are user Cyxymu's LiveJournal Google cache and LiveJournal account (unreachable at this writing). Larry Magid writes on CNet that this individual blogs about independence of a breakaway region of Georgia. Macworld has some speculation in other directions on the motivations behind the DDoS attack.
Update: 08/07 19:52 GMT by KD : Cyber attacks on Cyxymu are not new. For over a year Evgeny Morozov has been calling attention to him as the first digital refugee.

Comments

Asymmetrical warfare

[Hawthorne01]

Any guesses as to how many more people will start following "Cyxymu" solely because of this attack? It's called The Streisand Effect, Russia, and it's very real.

Re:Just like rs79 said yesterday

[vmxeo]

Some people didn't like what was posted to twitter in the past 24 hours and had other people take it down. It's a distraction. Scrutinize what happened before it down and not the distraction of it going down and you'll have your answer.

Wasn't yesterday the anniversary of the Russian military incursion in South Ossetia in Georgia? Perhaps after Twitter's widespread involvement with the events in Iran, certain political elements didn't want it happening there as well?