The popular social networking site Twitter has been hit by a denial of service attack, according to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. In an e-mail to CNN.com, Stone said this morning’s attack is not related to a recent incident in which a hacker stole internal documents from the site.
“There’s no indication that this attack is related to any previous activities. We are currently the target of a denial of service attack,” Stone said in the e-mail. Approximately 45 million people worldwide now rely on Twitter as a communication platform, and a number of them will be greatly inconvenienced.
Denial-of-service attacks are a common weapon employed by cyber criminals to disrupt the working of Web sites. Perpetrators enlist millions of computers to attempt to access a particular site. The site cannot handle the massive increase in traffic, and is rendered inaccessible.
While disruptive and hard to trace, this type of cyber attack is considered by experts to be a relatively unsophisticated technique. The attack itself doesn’t attempt to infiltrate the internal operations of a company’s computer infrastructure. It simply renders its Web site inactive.
Twitter’s status update said: “We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.” The millions of Twitter fans who have been disrupted by this attack will no doubt give vent over the next few days. I confidently expect to see Twitter and Denial-Of-Service at the top of the Google hit chart shortly!
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