Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user

Re:Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user by mixmax on Thursday August 06, 2009 @09:06PM (#746799)

So who is this Cyxymu and what are his (or her) political goals? That seems to be the key to finding out who might be behind it.

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Re:Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user by mixmax on Thursday August 06, 2009 @09:31PM (#746832)

From this article http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/07/twitter_attack_theor...

"a single user who vocally supports the Republic of Georgia."

I just submitted the article which also has a possible explanation as to ow the attack was carried out.

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Re:Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user by brown9-2 on Thursday August 06, 2009 @09:42PM (#746843)

"This was not like a botnet-style DDoS," Woodcock told The Register. "This was a joejob where people were just clicking on links in email and the people clicking on the links were not malefactors. They were just the sort of idiots that click on links in email without knowing what they are." Joejobs are spam messages that are designed not to push Viagra but to induce someone to click on a link in the hopes of harming the site being linked to.

Seriously, people following links in spam messages could cause enough traffic to flood Facebook and/or Twitter? That sounds a little hard to believe that THAT much traffic could be generated by people suckered by spam, let alone that the level of traffic would be sustainable.

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Re:Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user by mrduncan on Thursday August 06, 2009 @09:54PM (#746853)

I would think that the amount of effort to send out enough spam messages to generate that traffic could have been redirected into just generating that traffic in the first place.

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Re:Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user by endtime on Thursday August 06, 2009 @10:47PM (#746905)

It's easier to obtain a million email addresses than 10,000 computers. A non-distributed DoS is easy to stop.

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Re:Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user by vaksel on Friday August 07, 2009 @01:00AM (#747037)

so facebook and twitter were taken down by a bunch of people hitting the same link once? that seems messed up, you would think big sites like that would have the infrastructure to handle something like that

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Re:Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user by fname on Thursday August 06, 2009 @09:56PM (#746855)

It doesn't have to be spam. Ever heard of the Slashdot or Digg effect?

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Re:Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user by Devilboy on Thursday August 06, 2009 @09:54PM (#746854)

4chan and other popular social sites sometimes manage to organize such 'manual' DDOS attacks

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Re:Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user by jonny_noog on Thursday August 06, 2009 @09:59PM (#746859)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Internet_attacks

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Re:Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user by mahmud on Thursday August 06, 2009 @10:37PM (#746896)

4chan a social website?

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