Twitter crashes following malicious online attack
from Technology | guardian.co.uk by Charles Arthur
Social networking company comes under attack from virus-infected Windows PCs, but source unknown
Twitter’s site crashed on Thursday at about 3pm BST due to a “denial of service” attack – thousands of remote-controlled virus-infected PCs trying to contact the site.
Though the site came back up after an hour, the company said it was “continuing to defend against and recover from this attack”.
As a result lunch plans, breaking news, links to obscure web pages, news about your cat, the thoughts of celebrities, and wondering on Twitter why your tweets aren’t appearing – all had to be put on hold. The loss will have been felt most keenly in London, which Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive Evan Williams revealed on Wednesday has more Twitter users than any other city in the world.
The company’s status blog says that: “We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.”
Denial-of-service attacks – also known as DDOS attacks, for distributed DOS – happen when the controllers of “botnets” consisting of many thousands of virus-compromised Windows PCs decide to target a site. In the past banking, gambling and news sites – and even Google – have been the target of DDOS attacks.
The attacks use the electronic equivalent of ringing the site’s doorbell and running away: the targeted site’s server wastes its resources answering the call. In a typical DDOS attack, there may be millions of such fake approaches.
The aim is often to blackmail the site: sometimes the owners are told that unless they make a payment, the attacks will continue. Gambling sites have often suffered DDOS sites ahead of major sports events, and been warned that the same will follow when the event happens – their key time for bets – unless they pay protection money.
Whether that is the aim of this attack on Twitter is not known: the status blog, updated at 3.40pm BST, gives no other details.
Twitter has become one of the fastest-growing social networking sites in the world. In an interview on the BBC’s Newsnight program on Wednesday night, Evan Williams said that the UK had the second-largest user base after the US, and that London has more users than any other city in the world – even ahead of San Francisco, Twitter’s home town.
The UK is reckoned to have about 2.4 million Twitter users according to a recent Ofcom report, though its explosive growth may mean that even that figure is out of date.
DDOS attacks have become relatively commonplace online, but this is believed to be the first time that Twitter has been targeted. As companies get larger and more geographically distributed, they can handle such attacks because their servers are remote from each other. Twitter however is still comparatively small, with most of its resources in the US.
Twitter crashes following malicious online attack
from Technology | guardian.co.uk by Charles Arthur
Social networking company comes under attack from virus-infected Windows PCs, but source unknown
Twitter’s site crashed on Thursday at about 3pm BST due to a “denial of service” attack – thousands of remote-controlled virus-infected PCs trying to contact the site.
Though the site came back up after an hour, the company said it was “continuing to defend against and recover from this attack”.
As a result lunch plans, breaking news, links to obscure web pages, news about your cat, the thoughts of celebrities, and wondering on Twitter why your tweets aren’t appearing – all had to be put on hold. The loss will have been felt most keenly in London, which Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive Evan Williams revealed on Wednesday has more Twitter users than any other city in the world.
The company’s status blog says that: “We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.”
Denial-of-service attacks – also known as DDOS attacks, for distributed DOS – happen when the controllers of “botnets” consisting of many thousands of virus-compromised Windows PCs decide to target a site. In the past banking, gambling and news sites – and even Google – have been the target of DDOS attacks.
The attacks use the electronic equivalent of ringing the site’s doorbell and running away: the targeted site’s server wastes its resources answering the call. In a typical DDOS attack, there may be millions of such fake approaches.
The aim is often to blackmail the site: sometimes the owners are told that unless they make a payment, the attacks will continue. Gambling sites have often suffered DDOS sites ahead of major sports events, and been warned that the same will follow when the event happens – their key time for bets – unless they pay protection money.
Whether that is the aim of this attack on Twitter is not known: the status blog, updated at 3.40pm BST, gives no other details.
Twitter has become one of the fastest-growing social networking sites in the world. In an interview on the BBC’s Newsnight program on Wednesday night, Evan Williams said that the UK had the second-largest user base after the US, and that London has more users than any other city in the world – even ahead of San Francisco, Twitter’s home town.
The UK is reckoned to have about 2.4 million Twitter users according to a recent Ofcom report, though its explosive growth may mean that even that figure is out of date.
DDOS attacks have become relatively commonplace online, but this is believed to be the first time that Twitter has been targeted. As companies get larger and more geographically distributed, they can handle such attacks because their servers are remote from each other. Twitter however is still comparatively small, with most of its resources in the US.
用推友们建的dabr吧。还可以的，挺不错。要不自己建一个dabr也行。
昨晚是推特自己挂了，呵呵
twitter被河蟹了
最近用G1 + Opera来翻墙