It’s been only days since the microblogging service was shot down by unknown hackers when Twitter was once again attacked on Tuesday. Twitter said on its blog status that it was “analyzing the traffic data” so it could determine what kind of attack it’s getting. It lasted for about half an hour. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone stated in one of his emails on Monday that Twitter was continuing to come under attack.
But Biz however said that compared to the last attack, they were able to handle it to the point that Twitter is still in running condition. The systems are still looking good. They were able to identify the the target of the attack. It was a pro-Georgian blogger, the said attack was believed to silence his online criticism against Moscow in the last year’s Georgia-Russia war.

The said attack was a series of old school zombie computers, viruses simultaneously infecting computers to initiate series of visits to a website. This can totally slow down services or can possibly turn the site offline.

Last night, logging in to Twitter was hell. I was really struggling for hours to check my new tweets. A few more hours later, a shocking news exploded into the internet universe: Twitter is down and not working following a DDoS attack. Twitter suffered hours of downtime and is still down for some.

Twitter’s Statement:

“Denial of Service Attack On this otherwise happy Thursday morning,

Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case,

Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.” – Twitter Blog

And of course, while Twitter is down, one of the biggest fallback for their social networks, Facebook, got all the huge amount of traffic. Loading time to most users became sluggish. Twitter is actually back but still recovering so expect a bit slowdown on loading time.

Facebook’s Statement:

“Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users. No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users. We’re continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.”

So who could have done this?  According to most blogs that I have gone through:

1. A lot of people blame hackers. Well obviously it was a hack attack. If you guys remember Mikeyy Mooney, that 17 year old hacker who successfully injected a few worms, looks like one of the suspect on their list.
2. Funny but some people also believe it’s from Iran who initiated such attack. Why? Possibily they want to end that #iranelection madness.
3. New set 15-year-old pimple faced kids trying to make name in the world of Black and White Hat hacking.