Twitter Under Denial of Service Attack

Ambient Awareness. The cloud killer app?

By G C Network | September 10, 2008

Ambient Awareness: the ability to acquire, process, and act upon application specific contextual information, taking the current user preferences and state of mind into account. In the September 5th New…

The Cloud Wins in Minneapolis at the RNC!

By G C Network | September 9, 2008

Little did I know that while I was watching the Republicans cheer their standard bearer inside the Xcel Energy Center that the cloud infrastructure was outside defeating the forces of…

Cloud Computing vs. Virtualization

By G C Network | September 8, 2008

Yesterday, Reuven Cohen in ElasticVapor, provided an excellent post on the title subject. I’d like to “second his emotion” and, for my audience, add that cloud computing technologies and techniques…

Government Technology Cloud Recommendations

By G C Network | September 5, 2008

Recommendation on the cloud from Government Technology: No. 1: Educate your team about cloud computing. Don’t just ignore this topic as hype – the future is in this direction. Go…

Cloud Computing: A pay-by-consumption scalable service

By G C Network | September 4, 2008

John Edwards (not the Senator) of Computerworld sees cloud computing as a “…pay-by-consumption scalable service that’s usually free of long-term contracts and is typically application- and operating system-independent”. His recent…

Cloud Computing Dictionary

By G C Network | September 4, 2008

Geva Perry will be presenting at the October 8th SOA-R event. Before attending, you may want to visit his cloud computing dictionary to catch up on the current cloud computing…

Google Launches Chrome: Desktop-centric to Network-centric

By G C Network | September 3, 2008

According to Nicholas Carr, “Chrome is the first cloud browser”. If you’re not familiar with Chrome, this application is Google’s entry into the browser wars. In his blog, Mr. Carr…

Boeing Gives Up On Interoperable Modelling and SimulationNnetworks

By G C Network | September 3, 2008

Last week a Flightglobal article reported on the softening of Boeing’s stance on the need to establish standards for networking protocols across the US and global defence industry. Citing the…

Cisco: A Cloud Computing Company?

By G C Network | September 2, 2008

Yes Cisco ! Red Herring’s report on Cisco’s acquisition of PostPath last week presents a strong case for this. If finalized, PostPath would become Cisco’s fifteenth acquisition in less than…

Cloud Computing at top of Hype Cycle

By G C Network | August 29, 2008

Computerworld reports that Gartner see cloud computing as being at the top of the hype cycle. They have also settled on a definition: “a style of computing where massively scalable…

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.

( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS – KLJ )

Follow me at https://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson
Posted in

G C Network

1 Comments

  1. Chrystal K. on August 6, 2009 at 10:49 pm

    This is so sad.