Facebook and Twitter DDoS - Cyxymu
Who on Earth is Cyxymu and what’s the connection between his blog and recent Facebook and Twitter outages?
On Thursday August 6th Twitter posted an “extended downtime”, a 30 minute outage that was the longest in recent months. It used to have problems with its service in 2007 and 2008 but upgraded part of its infrastructure so this was a surprise to all.
At the time the top trending topics were “Tweets Created” and “Twitter Zombies”.
Then, soon after, Facebook, with an architecture that scales to over 300 million users, started experiencing outages.
It didn’t take long for these sites to start revealing the cause of the problem with Twitter posting a message saying the extended downtime, almost 2 hours by that time, was down to a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS). In a nutshell, a DDoS is created by hitting the target (in this case Twitter and Facebook) with many fake, automated requests so that the target is unable to return real requests. This is done using botnets often created by hackers which are made up of millions of computers that have been comprimised.
Now, more than 24 hours later Facebook revealed that this was all targetted at one person. According to Facebook’s chief security officer Max Kelly, a blogger in the Republic of Georgia with the username Cyxymu was the victim. The motives appear to be due to the current Georgia-Russia crisis.
Cyxymu posts controversial articles on his LiveJournal blog. He also posts to his Facebook page and tweets on Twitter.
Max Kelly said:
“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”
The twist in the tale seems to be that whilst attempting to silence Cyxymu they have now made him and his blog posts world-famous. His name has entered Google’s Hot Trends as a rising search.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet