Thursday, August 6, 2009

Twitter Under Denial of Service Attack

Multiple sources are reporting that Twitter continues to be under a denial of service attack. Some are speculating that this represents the power of a coordinated bot network attack. For the government community it is also a demonstration of what a well organized adversary can do against a major website.

Since Twitter is a cloud application on top of Amazon Web Services, my earlier thoughts explained in Cloud Computing: The Dawn of Maneuver Warfare in IT Security quickly come to mind.

I'm also contemplating that this could have something to do with Twitter effectiveness that I showcased in Iranian Protests Showcase Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (and Cloud Computing)!

The Georgia incident showed the reality of cyberwar. Is this a Cyber terrorist attack?

Update from Reuven Cohen:

If I were a betting man, I'd say that this attack was done using Multi-Stage BGP & DNS Attack Vector. My only real proof is a little common sense as well as the simple reason that a typical HTTP denial of service attack causes a spike in traffic not a drop as illustrated below.


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