By Alexei Oreskovic-Thu Aug 6, 2009 6:23pm EDT-Reuters.com
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Twitter and Facebook said they suffered service problems from hacker attacks on Thursday, raising speculation of a coordinated campaign against the world's most popular online social networks.
Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, was knocked down by a malicious attack that prevented people from accessing its website for several hours on Thursday.
Facebook members saw delays logging in and posting to their online profiles, which the social networking site said was related to an "apparent distributed denial of service attack."
Facebook was working with Twitter and Internet search company Google Inc to investigate further, said a person familiar with Facebook but who was not authorized to speak to the press.
Speculation swirled on the Internet that other social networking sites had also come under attack, after relatively lesser-known site LiveJournal said it too had been targeted by hackers on Thursday. But those rumors could not be confirmed.
The incidents follow a wave of similar cyber attacks in July that disrupted access to several high-profile U.S. and South Korean websites, including the White House site. South Korea's spy agency said at the time that North Korea might have been behind the attacks.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said on Twitter's blog that the site was the victim of a denial-of-service attack, a technique in which hackers overwhelm a website's servers with communications requests.
"We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate," Stone wrote.
A separate Twitter status Web page said later on Thursday that the site was back up, but that Twitter was continuing to recover from the attack.
Google said in an emailed statement that it was in contact with some non-Google sites that were impacted by Thursday's attacks to help investigate.
"Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services," the statement said.
ANTISOCIAL ATTACKS
Motives for denial-of-service attacks range from political to rabble-rousing to extortion, with criminal groups increasingly threatening to hobble popular websites that don't pay demanded fees, according to security experts.
Twitter's newfound fame makes it an easy target for hackers, said Steve Gibson, the president of Internet security research firm Gibson Research Corp.
Twitter, which lets users publish short, 140-character messages to groups of online "followers," is one of the fastest-growing Internet companies. Continued...
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar