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Twitter, Facebook DDoS Attack Targeted One User

Posted by kdawson on from the widespread-collateral-damage dept.

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.

2 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. 1-Year Anniversay of Russian Invasion of Georgia by reporter · · Score: 4, Interesting
    According to a report by the "Times Online" and another report by "guardian.co.uk", today is the 1-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Georgia. Russian troops has not exited the territory of Georgia though Vladimir Putin signed an agreement to do so. Further, the Kremlin has recognized the occupied territory -- Abkhazia and South Ossetia -- as independent nations although the entire family of Western nations has not.

    The coordinated Internet attack against a computer account owned by a Georgian is likely not a coincidence as the attack occurred precisely on the day marking the 1-year anniversary of this show of Russian military force. For that same reason, that a pair of Russian submarines loaded with nuclear missiles were recently patrolling off the East Coast of the United States is not a coincidence.

  2. It also targeted Iranian reformist accounts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Here is the list of active Iranian opposition to coup government that got attacked yesterday as well:
    http://www.facebook.com/mousavi
    http://www.facebook.com/pages/Zahra-Rahnavard-/79757303129
    http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-Mirdamadi-/129589377387
    http://www.facebook.com/pages/Abdollah-Ramezanzadeh/104800577446
    http://www.facebook.com/pages/Behzad-Nabavi-/112121917445

    source of list: http://iran.whyweprotest.net/news-current-events/27068-mousavis-facebook-deleted-4.html#post60410