Who is behind Twitter denial-of-service attack?

With Twitter down, and the world wondering what the fuck to do now, attention has turned to who is behind the denial-of-service attack that has put Twitter out for the count.

Malware companies and irritated governments such as China and Iran were immediately fingered.

China is believed to have form with digital espionage, being a committed opponent of the interweb and its various nodes, while Iran has recently been the focus of tens of thousands of Twitterers putting the government under serious pressure by turning their avatars green.

Various Russian crime gangs will no doubt come under scrutiny, as will various media pantomime figures such as Gordon Brown, Barack Obama, Fred Goodwin, Rupert Murdoch, Preston from the Ordinary Boys and a 67-year-old woman planning to have her first child.

But few are pointing to the real likely culprit – a spotty 15-year-old in Bulgaria.

ITV must be kicking itself on the day it sold its hopelessly outmoded Friends Reunited site for a fraction of what it paid. With Twitter down, the other social network sites probably experienced a minor resurgence as social media evangelists hit the web to, er, report that Twitter was down.

Anyway, The Register quotes an expert, Graham Cluley, a security consultant at Sophos.

“All those Twitter addicts will be doing something more useful instead,” Cluley quipped.

Some hope, they’re all searching the internet for more news or writing blogs about it.

• A genuine point. Any widgets on blogs that display a feed from Twitter are liable to break your site completely while it’s down. Best to check, and deactivate that widget if so.

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2 thoughts on “Who is behind Twitter denial-of-service attack?

  1. Pingback: Twitter panics over Trafigura « Robin Brown

  2. Pingback: The really, really simple guide to using Twitter « Robin Brown

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