Blog Feeds
Anti-Empire
The SakerA bird's eye view of the vineyard
Public InquiryInterested in maladministration. Estd. 2005
Human Rights in IrelandIndymedia Ireland is a volunteer-run non-commercial open publishing website for local and international news, opinion & analysis, press releases and events. Its main objective is to enable the public to participate in reporting and analysis of the news and other important events and aspects of our daily lives and thereby give a voice to people.
|
Yesterday's outage on Facebook, Twitter etc caused by cyber attack on 1 blogger.![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Only a few years ago I felt pretty good at geography and potential statehoods when I wrote that the West's sponsorship of Kosovo would logically lead to us thinking about Abkhazia and Ossetia & knowing full well the average reader would have a better idea of where to hunt almasties than point out those two places on a map. It only took a short while for both those latter places to be wrapped up in a short little war between Russia and its southern neighbour Georgia exactly one year ago. Yesterday users of Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal & blogger.com all suffered serious denial of services. Today we learn the cause was a sustained and concentrated attack on the cyber profile of one individual. He or She operates under the name "Cyxymu" which is a dinky phonetic rendering of Sukhumi which we all know is the capital of Abhkazia. Just in case you didn't know Sukhumi was the capital of Abhkazia and think a wikipedia entry on the place might serve as an interesting entry point to learning about all things Abhkazian, here's the entry: |
View Comments Titles Only
save preference
Comments (1 of 1)
Jump To Comment: 1BBC coverage of yesterday's attack on Twitter quotes Graham Cluley of security firm Sophos who on his blog has said: "This raises the astonishing thought that a vendetta against a single user caused Twitter to crumble, forcing us to ask serious questions about the site's fragility."
Only Google seems to have escaped unscathed from the attack. "Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services," the company said in a statement. The company has not confirmed which services were targeted in the attack, but it is thought that its e-mail service Gmail and video site YouTube were under fire. "We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by [an]... attack this morning, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack," the company said.
BBC tech writer Maggie Sheils notes on her blog : Of course, it wasn't a full day that the world went without the successful microblogging service (see 'Massive attack' strikes websites). It was just a few - crippling, to some - hours. But the distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) that hobbled Twitter and its 45 million worldwide users - and which also sucked in Facebook and LiveJournal - has security experts baffled and concerned. "Up is down, left is right and black is white," I was told by Cisco fellow and chief security researcher Patrick Peterson. "These attacks do not make sense. In the last few years, we have seen the criminals build systems to make money and not get caught. "Now we see them making a big splash with this attack which is of no benefit. It does not put a single dollar in their pocket and it exposes them to the risk of being caught," said Mr Peterson.
But maybe they made people think about Abkhazia and South Ossetia?
____________________________________________________________________________
c/f If you want to read last year's IMC coverage of the war you can enjoy it on the now completely restored IMC UK site whose downtime earlier today had nothing to do with Georgian bloggers and has now been restored.http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/08/435815.html
"Information Links & Sources for the (short) war in South Ossetia"
part 1 August 8th to morning August 12th
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/world/2008/08/40...?c=on
part 2 - mid afternoon August 12th - 16th 2008
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/world/2008/08/40...?c=on
& if you want to read the blogger chap whose words are so hot they down the net, then put "Cyxymu" through google or just invite him or her to be your friend on Facebook and send you a sext SMS so you know if it is a him or a her.
sa you can see the national flag of Abkhazia combines celtic rangers with ulster red hand & little stars. flags need stars.