Georgian Blogger Believed Target of Ongoing Twitter Attack

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on August 7, 2009 - 8:36am.

San Francisco - A blogger residing in the Republic of Georgia is believed to be the target of a denial-of-service hacker attack that has crippled Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal this week, CNET News.com reported. "It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard," Facebook chief security officer Max Kelly told CNET. "We're actively investigating the source of the attacks, and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them, if we can."

CNET also noted that the political conflict between Russia and Georgia, which was set off a year ago this week, also spilled over into online attacks.

Meanwhile, Twitter said on Friday that it continues to experience "a variety of attacks that continue to change in nature and intensity," and that its efforts to combat the attack have resulted in sluggishness and inability of third-party applications to access the service.

"The ongoing, massively coordinated attacks on Twitter this week appear to have been geopolitical in motivation," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the company's blog.

"However, we don't feel it's appropriate to engage in speculative discussion about these motivations. The open exchange of information can have a positive impact globally and our job is to keep Twitter services running reliably to the best of our ability."

http://snipurl.com/pc6l2 (VentureBeat)

http://blog.twitter.com/2009/08/adventure-continues.html

http://status.twitter.com