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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.
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.
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.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Here in capitalist America whole country use Twitter to get informed. In Soviet Russia, Twitter shut down whole country to get informer!
So immediatly following a true DDoS attack on these sites you provide links to them so that they can then be \.'d this...is...awsome.
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?
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Well, technically they went in after repeatedly telling the Georgians to stop fucking with the south ossetians. Obviously there is more to it than this but for those of us who actually followed the events leading up to the russian forces entering south ossetia it's painfully obvious that most people only noticed something was going on when western media outlets began pumping out "Russia invades Georgia!", "$POLITICIAN says Russian attack on Georgia worse than nazi atrocities" and similar headlines.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Odd, CNN had reported they were Akula-Class Attack submarines and specifically pointed out that they did not carry nuclear warheads. I think this article is sensationalizing the fact that they are nuclear-powered by using the more vague term "nuclear-armed" in order to make people think that they're boomers.
If the location of Russian Boomers was world news while on patrol they wouldn't be a show of force they'd be a sign of weakness as the whole point is you have to fear either a first strike without time to respond or a retaliatory strike from a target you can't take out in your first strike because you can't find it.
Knowledge of where that launch platform is (which means you can bet your ass it'd being shadowed by an attack sub of our own) would invalidate the threat.
They are Akula class attack submarines, which in a war would primarily be used against submarines and ships. They are quite possibly armed with nuclear weapons, but not ICBMS. The big nuclear missiles are on Typhoon class subs that are, presumably, drifting around undetected somewhere in the Barents Sea.
Amen brother! It's saddening how the western media choose to ignore when Georgia started shelling civilian targets in South Ossetia and then launched a full scale invasion. Georgians were preparing for it for 4 years and planned to do it in one day before Russia could interfere. But only when Russia responded a day and a half later did we here about and what we heard was "Russia Invades Georgia!". There are both sides to this story but in this particular case it was Georgia that was the aggressor. And let's not forget history. South Ossetia was given to Georgia by Stalin ( who is Georgian) in the 1950's. Prior to that Ossetia was it's own entity and they and Georgians have a mutual hatred for each other dating back centuries. So when you hear that Georgia "lost it's territories" to Russian "aggression", stop and consider the real facts, not what news media is telling you!