The day when social media stood still. Online world looked crippled. And we got to know just how dependent we are on social networks.
Waves after waves of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks hit popular websites like Twitter, Facebook and Live Journal yesterday, crippling their infrastructure. The sites were down for hours and continued their struggle to get back to full potential for a long time. Sounds scary, right? If you are wondering what the hell a DDoS attack is, then read on.
Consider at least a dozen fat people trying to squeeze past a small door in the mad rush to the kitchen. This stops the flow of other consumers. And they are denied of legitimate service requests. In the same way, malicious bots attack the victim server and it is typically saturated with so many fake requests that the victim is unable to return legitimate ones.
Though DDoS attacks hardly pose any threat in terms of data hacking they can still cause the servers to be jammed for days. The last time this happened to the online world way back in 2000 it caused $1.7 billion in lost revenue and damages. And how can we forget the recent riffs between U.S. and North Korea over some DDoS attacks on government websites on the U.S. shores.
Well, apparently such attacks are very difficult to protect against, even for big and established websites. It seems the malicious hackers are evolving in technologies with pace to the security teams.
Several theories have been put forward regarding the origins of this worldwide attack. Experts say that this DDoS attack wasn’t a traditional one using automated bots, but one propagated via spam email messages and tweets that hit the social networks. According to Bill Woodcock, a respected internet research expert, the attack may have been collateral damage from the Russia-Georgia conflicts. Personally I find it tough to connect the dots between conflicts in Asia and attack on Social Media networks.
It’s still unclear if we’ll ever find out the mastermind(s) behind yesterday’s DDoS attacks were (was)? But I hope that justice is served in the end. No one should take our internet life away from us and walk away without charge.
