[NEWS] TWITTER & FACEBOOK HACKED ON AUGUST 6, 2009 THURSDAY

Admin

*********************************************************************

[NEWS] TWITTER & FACEBOOK HACKED ON AUGUST 6, 2009 THURSDAY Twitte10

[NEWS] TWITTER & FACEBOOK HACKED ON AUGUST 6, 2009 THURSDAY Facebo10

SAN FRANCISCO - CYBER attacks forced wildly popular micro-blogging site Twitter offline on Thursday and caused performance problems for hot social-networking service Facebook.

Twitter was down for more than an hour before the California firm got it back online with a warning at the website that 'we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack'.

'The continuing denial of service attack is being mitigated although there is still degraded service for some folks while we recover completely,' Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in an official company blog.

'Twitter has been working closely with other companies and services affected by what appears to be a single, massively coordinated attack. As to the motivation behind this event, we prefer not to speculate.'

Facebook was 'degraded' by an early-morning distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the Palo Alto, California-based Internet star's website, said Facebook spokesman Brandee Barker.

'No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users,' Ms Barker said. 'We're continuing to monitor the situation.' Twitter and Facebook have teamed with US Internet powerhouse Google to investigate the attacks.

Cyber attacks were launched on Google websites, but the firm deflected the assaults. 'Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services,' said company spokesman Nate Tyler.

'We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by a DOS attack this morning, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack.' Hackers evidently employed classic DDoS attacks in which legions of zombie computers, machines infected with viruses, are commanded to simultaneously visit a website.

Such massive onslaught of demand can overwhelm website servers, slowing service or knocking it offline. 'Ten years ago we saw the first DDoS attacks take down some of the world's largest websites,' said Cisco chief security researcher Patrick Peterson.

'The irony here is that botnets, infected criminally-controlled consumer PCs, are the problem. Many of today's tweetless are part of the attack if their PC has been infected due to poor security.' A DDoS attack hit Twitter about 6am local time (1200 GMT, 6pm Singapore time) and caused the service to go offline temporarily.

Access to the website continued to be slow, with some aspiring users getting messages telling them that connections had 'timed out' because Twitter computers were taking too long to respond. -- AFP

CREDITS:
Source : The Straits Times
Shared By: DTL

CF Member

Woah.
World of internet is surely not secure =.="
And even facebook is having some problems right now~~~

[NEWS] TWITTER & FACEBOOK HACKED ON AUGUST 6, 2009 THURSDAY

[NEWS] TWITTER & FACEBOOK HACKED ON AUGUST 6, 2009 THURSDAY

Similar topics

Similar topics