Australian hacker arrested
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A 20 year old Australian hacker has been charged for infecting 3,000 machines with a virus designed for collecting financial information. The currently unnamed man is also accused of being capable of performing a 74,000 machine wide DDoS attack. Officials say they will also be able to identify more offenders with additional information they've obtained. He's scheduled to appear September 4th in Adelaide, Australia.
Twitter blackout: Relax.
Yes, everyone, Twitter is still intermittent, on the web side anyway, and with a Russian botnet unleashing a DDoS on the service, it won't be the last time that we see Twitter attacked. So why did Twitter go down, but other victims of the attacks stay up? We ask Tom Merritt of CNET, and Stuart Miles of Pocket-Lint.
Tom reminds us that Twitter is still a young company compared to Facebook, and especially when compared to Google. Those two larger, more experienced companies have set up systems to better deal with malicious bad-doers who'd wish them ill will. Stuart thinks we're going to have to start realizing that what happens in real life can happen online too. Cities get crowded, so sometimes when someone is commuting to work, they get stuck in traffic. The same thing can happen online, except without the cars and smog.
What's your take? Did you learn anything from the great Twit-out of 2009? Sound off in the comments.
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Twitter site still intermittently down
Twitter, along with Livejournal and Facebook, have been the target of a Denial of Service Attack which has now moved into its second day. Cnet claims that the attack is targeted at a specific Georgian (country not state) individual. Yesterday, all of Twitter was down, but today the company seems to be keeping the API working. No news on where or who the attack is coming from.
Twitter, Facebook attacks targeted Georgian blogger: Report
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CNET's security reporter, Elinor Mills, says the DDoS attacks plaguing Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal actually were targeting one Georgian blogger going by the name of Cyxymu, and that the overall service disruption was collateral damage.
Internet heavyweights appear to have coinciding downtimes
Oddly, two of the internet's most prominent social sites, Twitter and Facebook, are both experiencing outages. Twitter's outage is sitewide, and Facebook's seems limited to its login server (ie if you're logged in, you'll stay logged in.)
We'll try to figure out what's going on, and pass along info as we get it.
UPDATE: As we sorta expected, Twitter is suffering a DDoS attack, and we can't help but speculate Facebook is under a similar attack.
DDOS attack periodically brings down Gawker sites
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In a blog post this morning, Gawker Media confirms a DDOS attack from unknown hackers periodically brought down the network over the weekend. The attack was reportedly aimed at a site formerly owned by Gawker but remains hosted on its servers.
AT&T blocking controversial site after DDoS attack: Reports
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TechDirt, and others, report AT&T is blocking access to 4Chan, a controversial internet site known as being a place for internet pranksters to cavort (more on its Wikipedia page). Apparently, the move started after 4Chan launched some sort of DDoS attack against AT&T, a claim that can't be verified. If true, AT&T's stance would likely violate net neutrality mandates and could serve as additional provocation for the 4Chan tricksters to perform more pranks on the company.
Update 8:44 AM EST: Apparently, the site is back, but suffering its own DDoS attack from attention. Expect this story to continue over the next several days.
Update 10:31 AM EST: One of our commenters points to this post, where a network engineer points out they were trying to save 4chan from the mess. If the posts are to be believed, looks like AT&T was actually the good guy in this case.
[Originally posted July 27th at 7:14AM]
Source of DDOS attacks from UK, not North Korea
The distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks that brought down several United States and South Korean government, among many commercial, web sites last week originated from the United Kingdom and not from North Korea as originally speculated. According to the Vietnamese computer security firm that performed the analysis, the person or people responsible for the botnet attack, using over 166,000 PCs, could very well be tracked down.