Following on my own social media problems, I found this story compelling. An extraordinary cyber attack that silenced all Twitter users on Thursday turned out to have been intended for just one blogger…
“According to CNET News.com, which got its information from a Facebook security executive, it appears that Cyxymu’s Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Blogger accounts were attacked simultaneously in a massive denial-of-service attack. Facebook, LiveJournal and Blogger were able to ward off the attack for the most part, but the assault brought Twitter to its knees for much of Thursday.
The culprits still haven’t been identified, CNET reported, although an Internet traffic expert quoted by the New York Times said the attack came from Abkhazia, a territory along the eastern coast of the Black Sea that’s in dispute between Russia and the Republic of Georgia.
And why was Cyxymu—a pro-Georgian blogger who “has long been viewed as an antagonist by some Russian supporters,” according to The Register—targeted? “To keep his voice from being heard,” the Facebook exec told CNET.”
Here’s what I find so chilling about yesterday’s Twitter attack: that these guys, whoever they are, apparently thought nothing of taking down an entire communications network because they didn’t like what one person was saying.
Imagine if someone didn’t like what you were saying, and decided to shut you up by nuking your ISP, or your wireless carrier. Or heck, the entire phone system. All for you….”
So – no it’s not paranoia. If you happen to stumble on certain things and if your world view is not in synch with that of the powers that be, I can assure you, you will be targeted — but in such a way that you may pass it off as “random” or “happens to everyone..”
Now you know. There are people senseless and ruthless enough that they don’t mind how many people are affected so long as the voice they want to shut up, shuts up…
I went to bed at almost 3AM that day and had problems accessing Twitter because I need to Tweet some important messages.
I noticed that I could not log in to my account since midnight. All other sites are working fine. I thought it was caused by a tool used to get instant followers.
You’re missing a large part of the picture. Namely that the vast majority of netizens are apparently essentially computer-illiterate. These “denial of service” attacks are executed by many thousands if not millions of “zombie bot-nets” — in particular, terribly old and buggy Windows users. So long as the field remains so immature and illiterate, where almost any reasonably motivated teenager can take control over such vast computing power, one really shouldn’t make such a big deal over these things. This doesn’t really say much about ruthlessness or censorship, so much as it does about crappy Windows software and the millions of illiterate users who use it :P.
(And perhaps about the centralized, and thus easily-attackable nature of http servers (websites) — a problem which freenetproject.org solves :b.)