Cyber-attackers managed to bring down micro-blogging giant Twitter overnight, with hackers also causing problems for social networking giant Facebook.’
It is the latest in a string of problems for Twitter, which has suffered several outages in the past few months, as well as a massive security breach that saw hundreds of corporate documents spread over the internet.
The site was pulled down for over one hour, with the website publishing a statement saying that “we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack”.
“Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack,” co-founder Biz Stone said on the site’s official blog.
“Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users.”
The attack, which occurred at about 6am AEST, has been categorised as a “distributed-denial-of-service” attack, which commands other computers infected with viruses to simultaneously attack a website, often bringing down its servers due to huge traffic volumes.
Facebook spokesperson Brandee Barker said in a statement the attack seems to have been dealt with. “No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users. We’re continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.”
Biz Stone vented his frustration when the site came back online, “tweeting” that, “We had a lot of things we’d rather be doing this morning, defending against a DoS wasn’t one of them”.
While Facebook is a stranger to regular server problems, Twitter has suffered from several issues during the last 12 months, giving it somewhat of a tarnished reputation on the internet.
That reputation was not helped last month when a hacker gained access to several executive email accounts, and stole hundreds of corporate documents detailing plans for future revenue models.
But Sitepoint.com technical director Kevin Yank says the company’s reputation for unreliable server issues and relaxed security is as much an employee problem as a developer matter, and that all online businesses need to be aware of the dangers.
“Twitter started as a small company, and they’ve grown faster than they were prepared for. They’ve been caught out on things that a little company wouldn’t have dealt with, and they need to play catch up. This is training and corporate policy issue as much as a technical issue.”
“What happened last night, anyone can fall victim to that sort of thing, that’s just people deciding to attack someone, it can happen to anyone. But Twitter has had security lapses, and what I’ve seen is that these security lapses have been a matter of corporate policy. So not necessarily problems with the professionalism of their developers, but weak points in staff training.”
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Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
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