Collateral damage
It looks like the Twitter denial of service attack that occurred yesterday, and is still affecting the service today, was in fact collateral damage from an attack on a single blogger based in Georgia - the country, not the US state.
The attack also affected Facebook, LiveJournal and Google-owned Blogger and YouTube, according to several websites, including CNET and the New York Times, who have testimony from insiders to this effect.
Speaking to CNET, Max Kelly, chief security officer as Facebook, said Georgian blogger ‘Cyxymu' was the target. "It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard," Kelly said.
"The people who are coordinating this attack, the criminals, are definitely determined and using a lot of resources. If they're asking our infrastructure to generate hundreds of pages a second, that's a lot of pages our users can't see."
Meanwhile the NY Times spoke to Bill Woodcock, an Internet traffic tracker, who reckoned they may have used a botnet to send loads of spam containing links to all Cyxymu's social media sites. The resulting traffic to his sites may have caused the subsequent denial of service.
There has been political and military tension between Georgia and Russia for some time, primarily concerning other smaller states in the Caucasus region that are seeking autonomous status.
