Chief Security Officer at facebook has told CNET News that a Georgian Blogger was the target in the attack on Thursday. This blogger uses an account name “Cyxymu” and has an account on multiple social networking sites. These are his accounts on Twitter, facebook, Livejournal, YouTube. Why was he targeted? Anti-Russian views of the blogger could be a potential reason. Though, except twitter and LiveJournal all the other services were able to handle the attack. It is still to be determined whether this was Distributed Denial Of Service (DDoS) Attack or an attack caused by a torrent of spam E-Mails having a common link.

In case of DDoS the hacker computer hijacks several (1000+ in this case) computers which in turn are instructed by the hacker to visit a particular web page all at the same time. This bars most of the legitimate traffic from coming in.

E-Mail spam sends a commom link (of the targeted site) to redirect huge amount of traffic to a particular page. Facebook CSO has denied the potential of E-Mail spam stating

“It’s unlikely that there would be enough recipients — all clicking on the URLs at the same time — to bring a site down”

UPDATE : Twitter is again down at some places and working slowly at others.

Follow-Up

Twitter Blog : Update on Today’s DoS Attacks by Biz Stone

The New York Times : Georgia Takes a Beating in the Cyberwar With Russia by John Markoff

TechCrunch : Twitter Outage Moves Into Day 2 by Michael Arrington

NEWS.com.au : Twitter attacks targeted Georgian blogger by Andrew Ramadge

UMBC ebiquity : DOS attacks on Twitter et al. focused on Russian blogger Cyxymu by Tim Finin

The Register : Researcher: Twitter attack targeted anti-Russian blogger by Dan Goodin