The article by Monica Hesse in Washington Post, on August 7, carried the sensational news about the crashing of web sites Twitter and Facebook, on Thursday.
“At 9 a.m., millions of users of Twitter.com found themselves unable to access the microblogging Web site…”
“Undaunted, the rejected Twitterers trooped to Facebook.com, the social networking site that has more than 200 million users… But before users could begin to type, “Is sad that Twitter is down,” a terrible and panic-inducing discovery: Facebook was down,too.”
The two companies offered answers:
“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial-of-service attack. Attacks such as these are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now.”
“Kathleen Loughlin, a spokeswoman for Facebook also cited a denial-of-service attack and promised that Facebook was continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.”
“Neither companies offered explanations for the attacks, which occur when a person or group of people target a Web site for the purpose of making a site dysfunctional for its intended users.”
My question to the Gather administration is whether Gather can also be the victim of such attacks. I had been facing some connectivity problems with gather a few days ago. I am unaware of the causes, but I now feel that a similar attack was perhaps taking shape!
Has Gather taken any steps to prevent such attacks in future. We are so much accustomed to communicating world-wide through these networking sites, that it gives a feeling of being completely cut-off from the world, when it fails.
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Comments: 29
To all you hackers and virus sender-outers: GET A LIFE!!!!....GET YOURSELF A BOY/GIRLFRIEND...YOU ARE NOT IMPRESSING ANYONE
He was twittering about revolution against Georgia. They wanted to stop him but all they did was now bring attention to him.
DDOS attacks are usually though not always initiated from a hacked server in an attempt to hide the perpetrator from detection. In many cases the attacker has previously infected many PCs with a trojan or other malware (short for malicious software) that will accept the signal from the main attack pint and then begin to attack the target itself. This is how the attacker is able to use thousands or in rare cases even millions of PCs and servers to facilitate such an attack.
A site like Gather will extremely low chances of becoming a target for such an attack unless it grows in size to rival the biggest sites. The purpose of these attacks is usually to strike at the target site for some reason. However they can also be aimed at inconveniencing the many users of such sites. In the past some such attacks were simply to garner public attention. The attacks on Facebook and Twitter seem similar to past attacks that took down or caused access problems to major sites such as AOL, MSN, Yahoo and others. These types of DDOS attacks
Some ways that all internet users can help to combat these attacks are:
1. Keep your computer operating system up to date, such as using windows update to keep your system protected from new threats.
2. Keep adware, malware and antivirus programs on your system and keep them up to date as well.
3. Always report any connectivity issues or other issues with a site to its support or administrative staff.
Remember DOS and DDOS attacks are rarely harmful or destructive as are many malware programs. However this does not mean they are not costly to the companies involved or even individual users in some cases. All we can do to help prevent the spread of these attacks and the software behind them will help us all in the long run.
However an ISP can have major outages for a variety of reasons. Whether they be hardware, software or Internet related. A DDOS attack could conceivably create traffic issues on the web. This could then affect other sites traffic by virtue of packets being rerouted, dropped or being unable to reach their target. The amount of traffic required to cause these type issues is tremendous.
Even a site such as Facebook (the 4th largest in the world at this time) Does not generate the amount of traffic required to cause this type issue from normal usage. The reason is simply that while Facebook has over 200 million accounts registered with it's site. Only a small percentage are active at any given time. This means that a DDOS attack that could take down Facebook would not necessarily cause any actual issues with internet traffic.
Of course I am on the outside looking in and thus not privy to details of exactly what has happened at either site involved in these issues. Therefore there is a small possibility that these incidents could be related though that would be highly unlikely given what we know so far.
. this is Tom Gerace's words "Tonight, between approximately 12:20 am ET and 1:20 am ET, most people could not access Gather. We received notice from the company that provides our primary Internet connectivity that they suffered a major outage"
What a bummer!
Thanks.