Twitter as a weapon of war
Posted on August 18th, 2009 by sherrilynne
- Image via CrunchBase
It’s been pointed out to me a few times over the last few days that within a couple of hours of my interview with Manx Radio’s Stuart Peters about Twitter, the site crashed and was down for hours. The implication is that Talking Heads audience members flocked to the microblogging site in droves to check it out and, due to the sheer volume of Isle of Man traffic, the site collapsed. It’s flattering to think that I am that persuasive, however unlikely.
What actually happened is that Twitter suffered from a malicious attack, it is said, by Russian hackers who were keen to silence a pro-Georgian blogger. And Twitter wasn’t the only social network to feel the impact of the attack, Facebook and Livejournal were both a bit jittery from the onslaught.
This type of aggression online is nothing new. Known as a ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDoS), hackers have been carrying these attacks almost since the birth of the Internet.
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