Twitter attacked! No one can tweet about it

Posted by kent on August 6th, 2009

Couldn't find out what Ashton Kutcher was having for breakfast this morning? Blame a denial of service attack on popular social-media/micro-blogging site Twitter. While service has now been restored, the attack knocked the service offline for about three hours (according to their blog posts). A denial of service attack happens when a group of computers continually sends requests to a website, overwhelming its capabilities to handle traffic. Usually, the computers that do this are infected with malware, and their owners are unaware it's even happening. According to Information Week, it was a denial of service attack that crippled the popular Gawker media sites earlier this week.

Malware can hit any unprotected computer making it a part of a botnet. While a three-hour Twitter fail is not catastrophic, the same attack on the computer systems belonging to a banking, healthcare, or public utilities company could be. Keeping your computer protected from viruses and malware not only protects your data, but also protects the computer systems that we all rely on.

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