Denials of Service: Scary? Annoying? Neither?
By Harry McCracken | Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Turns out it wasn’t just Twitter that someone tried to bring down via Distributed Denial of Service today. Cnet’s Elinor Mills is reporting that a Facebook executive says that a pro-Georgian activist with accounts on multiple social media sites was targeted, and that Facebook, Blogger, YouTube, and other sites were also under attack. Everybody else who used the sites was apparently just caught in the crossfire.
Hence today’s T-Poll:
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August 6th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
DDoS attacks are certainly a form of cyber-terrorism, but there's nothing really frightening about them. We know where they come from and why, but since they rarely target anything that's truly critical to everyday life, the world moves on.
However, it does show that if we're going to depend increasingly on the internet for mission-critical stuff, there will probably have to be some fundamental changes to the way that information travels around the web. I'm not counting on that happening any time soon, because it would also likely mean the death of anonymity on the internet, something that a lot of people seem to enjoy.
August 6th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Today’s distributed denial of service attack on Twitter shows how important it is to have alternate mediums of communication. It also was a real time lesson to show the lag time between when this event began this morning, and the time the major media outlets began to report it. It took the Drudge Report at least a half hour from the time I provided the news tip – not saying I was the first – only that I figured out something serious was wrong with Twitter shortly after 9 this morning and began searching for answers and calling it to Matt’s attention.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:29 am
It’s proof that there are too many morons in the world with too much time on their hands.
As for cyber-terrorism, there are FAR more worrisome things happening than denial of service attacks.
On the positive side, every weakness revealed is an opportunity to learn what needs to be done to strengthen the system.
August 8th, 2009 at 8:45 am
Having a DDOS attack waged against you could be considered a badge of honor among websites — you don’t know if you’ve really “made it” until you get one. By then, you hopefully have the resources to deal with it properly. But it still sucks very, very badly.
Ultimately, I think DDOS attacks show the weakness of the world’s operating systems — and user practices — that so many PCs can become zombified and turned into unwitting tools of disruption.