Some of you may have already heard that there is an allegation running around – started by a FaceBook security person, so its fairly high-profile – that yesterday’s FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, LiveJournal and others DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service, see a decent review here) attack might have been perpetrated to silence a man whose been blogging about the Georgia / Russia conflict. Well, it now seems that Live Journal has taken down the man’s blog.
But you can still see a cached version of it on Google’s Translate service here.
2 replies on “Look Who’s Blogging”
There’s a very scary, unmentioned, aspect to this story that I haven’t seen the MSM pick up yet.
The more appropriate headline ought to be “Russia Brings One Of The Biggest Websites On Earth To Its Knees Over One Little Blogger”.
So, if the Russians can do that with Twitter, what’s to stop any country, or bunch ‘o whackos, from silencing, shutting down, or generally fucking with, any site?
How about shutting down the stock market for a day? Or the Associated Press?
Denial Of Service attacks are not too hard to create. It shouldn’t be to hard to create a firewall against them…
You’ve got that exactly right, Mark. And Twitter is well-aware of their deficiencies, as they should have been long before now. Large, high-profile sites like that should be running a better system that can cope with these sorts of things: Google’s YouTube and other services were not brought down by the same attack. I’m quite certain the Stock Exchange’s many networks (there’s not just one) are beefy as all get-out since 911, but you never know until some fucker tries it.
The really scary thing is that little guys like me could easily be brought down by such an attack and there’s little to nothing we can do about it. Not that Russia really wants a piece of me, but the attacker doesn’t need to be anywhere near that big, which is the point. What’s more, to take me out would mean disrupting traffic to a commerical server box, most of whose customers have nothing to do with the beef between me and Attacker X.
That means huge pressure on hosts to eliminate sites which garner such attention. THAT’s the real pinch point.