Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user | Hacker News Reader

Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user

news.cnet.com

61 pointsmjfern20 comments

"It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard,"

I never would have heard of this guy were it not for this DDoS attack that attempted to silence him. Streisand effect strikes again. When will people learn.

Maybe Cyxymu orchestrated it him- or herself to gain some notoriety. :)

If the attacks against Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal were actually directed at his account, that he did it himself is the only thing that would make sense to me. The DoS couldn't just last forever and why would one bring 3 websites down rather than just do something to his internet connection?

When you manage to do what happened today, I suppose it's not really much harder to do that instead.

Exactly. This attack aims to promote the guy and the falthy stuff he posts on this blog, but definitely not to silence him!

What a load of s*%&$. Was he the only pro Georgian blogger out there? Why go through all this to target him when I am sure there are thousands of pro Georgian websites and blogs all over the place. For example, why not attack the white house website:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Vice-President-Biden-Reaffirm...

Or any of the major US news websites which are all quite pro-Georgian.

So by going through all this trouble to silence this particular blogger the evil FSB is not removing much pro Georgian info from the net at all, as there are many much more popular sources of pro Georgian information that are still online. Also, what the hell were the evil FSB trying to acomplish anyways. I mean, they know those websites will resume in a couple of hours after the attacks. Was it so important to silence that guy for several hours?

Oh, and let's not pretend that having an accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal and Google blogs is something unique, I guarantee you thousands of people have all these accounts.

But don't mind this - when in doubt blame the FSB. Now it is no surprise that that particular blogger has floated the FSB theory, he just wants to be famous. Maybe he is paranoid enough to believe this story but that does not mean we should. But it is rather amazing how quickly any bizarre and paranoid evil-russia-behind-the-scenes theory gets picked up by major newspapers.

My point exactly! It is plain ludicrous to think that the imperialistic ambitions-driven Russian government would flood Livejournal, Twitter and Facebook just to silence that one guy. I mean, in the end, these are the same media that Russian bloggers use to state their anti-Georgian opinions. It was either a lets-see-what-will-happen DDoS or this guy indeed orchestrated it to gain some popularity.

Maybe he knew something that others do not?

It's not "Cyxymu", it's Sukhumi. Someone at CNET couldn't be bothered to notice that the article is in Cyrillic.

No, actually, the livejournal account is literally "cyxymu". The word is best written as Sukhumi (the Georgian city), but the cnet article refers to the "account name" and so is completely accurate.

So who is this Cyxymu and what are his (or her) political goals? That seems to be the key to finding out who might be behind it.

From this article http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/07/twitter_attack_theor...

"a single user who vocally supports the Republic of Georgia."

I just submitted the article which also has a possible explanation as to ow the attack was carried out.

"This was not like a botnet-style DDoS," Woodcock told The Register. "This was a joejob where people were just clicking on links in email and the people clicking on the links were not malefactors. They were just the sort of idiots that click on links in email without knowing what they are." Joejobs are spam messages that are designed not to push Viagra but to induce someone to click on a link in the hopes of harming the site being linked to.

Seriously, people following links in spam messages could cause enough traffic to flood Facebook and/or Twitter? That sounds a little hard to believe that THAT much traffic could be generated by people suckered by spam, let alone that the level of traffic would be sustainable.

I would think that the amount of effort to send out enough spam messages to generate that traffic could have been redirected into just generating that traffic in the first place.

It's easier to obtain a million email addresses than 10,000 computers. A non-distributed DoS is easy to stop.

so facebook and twitter were taken down by a bunch of people hitting the same link once? that seems messed up, you would think big sites like that would have the infrastructure to handle something like that

It doesn't have to be spam. Ever heard of the Slashdot or Digg effect?

4chan and other popular social sites sometimes manage to organize such 'manual' DDOS attacks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Internet_attacks

4chan a social website?

Chinese Twitter users who viewed as dissents also experienced false complaint and attacks similar to this lately, possibly by Chinese crackers hired by the gov.

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