Yesterday, many social networking and blogging sites, including Twitter and facebook, were brought to their knees because of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. According to CNet, the cyber attack was implemented by Russian hackers to silence an outspoken pro-Georgian blogger who goes by the name "Cyxymu."
I have never even heard about Cyxymu or his blog until today, therefor I have my doubts that an individual with little influence in the rest of the world would be the target of an attack this momentous. Number one, a DDoS attack would only cripple a site for a short period of time, so if the hackers' intention was to single out this blogger and silence him, it wasn't very effective. Number two, the attack brought so much media attention, Cyxymu will gain numerous more followers and supporters now making the scheme counter-productive on the hackers' part.
This whole scenario just doesn't add up to me. Either the hackers who launched this attack were amateurs, or the attack was not focused on silencing one person but to temporarily silence us all. Many attacks like this have no motivation other than to prove it can be done.
I'm curious what your feeling are on the DDoS attacks yesterday. Could it be politically motivated or just random? Are we making too big of a deal about social media being shut down for a few hours? Please share you thoughts.
Friday, August 7, 2009
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Sometimes it's not so much to silence someone as to make a statement or prove that there is enough muscle out there to bring major websites down with a few keystrokes.
ReplyDeleteI'm more inclined to believe that this was a test of the bots performing the DDoS than a targeted attack against a blogger. If you think about it, nobody's going to claim that it's the end of the world or that national security is threatened if Twitter has a hiccup, but redirect that traffic to a branch of the govenment, and suddenly the country goes into the virtual equivalent of DEFCON 1. (Furthermore, I don't know if I would/could trust CNet for my security news, and that Nmap scan result they show in the banner is meaningless.)
I didn't realize it was a DDoS on the sites until later in the day. At first, I thought my office was blocking the two sites since everything else worked fine. As for what caused it, I like this explanation on Wired:
ReplyDelete"It’s not clear what the motivation is for the attack. One of the most famous, and overblown DDoS attacks was launched against Estonia’s media and governemnt by Russian nationalist hackers and wannabes."
(Source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/twitter-facebook-attacks-no-surprise-to-security-experts/)