Twitter under cyber attack
MICRO-BLOGGING network Twitter was disabled for two hours yesterday in what appeared to be a malicious attack caused by thousands of remote-controlled PCs.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said on Twitter’s blog that the site was the victim of a denial-of-service attack, a technique in which hackers overwhelm a website’s servers with communications requests.
“We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate,” Stone wrote.
The social networking site’s service was restored after two hours, but the company said it was “continuing to defend against and recover from this attack”.
Twitter’s newfound fame makes it an easy target for hackers, said Steve Gibson, the president of internet security research firm Gibson Research.
A single group could have been behind recent problems on Twitter and Facebook as hackers evolve their ability to attack multiple sites at once, Gibson said.
When hackers stage a denial-of-service attack they use thousands of PCs to repeatedly access the site, causing it to fail.