Yesterday's outage on Facebook, Twitter etc caused by cyber attack on 1 blogger.

Friday August 07, 2009 17:02

by Relict Almasty - iosaf

Only a few years ago I felt pretty good at geography and potential statehoods when I wrote that the West's sponsorship of Kosovo would logically lead to us thinking about Abkhazia and Ossetia & knowing full well the average reader would have a better idea of where to hunt almasties than point out those two places on a map. It only took a short while for both those latter places to be wrapped up in a short little war between Russia and its southern neighbour Georgia exactly one year ago. Yesterday users of Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal & blogger.com all suffered serious denial of services. Today we learn the cause was a sustained and concentrated attack on the cyber profile of one individual. He or She operates under the name "Cyxymu" which is a dinky phonetic rendering of Sukhumi which we all know is the capital of Abhkazia.

Just in case you didn't know Sukhumi was the capital of Abhkazia and think a wikipedia entry on the place might serve as an interesting entry point to learning about all things Abhkazian, here's the entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhumi

As of writing one can read the twitter account of Cyxymu here http://twitter.com/Cyxymu but the blog stored on LiveJournal is still unavailable http://cyxymu.livejournal.com/ It is reported today that yesterday the only Facebook users who would have been able to keep up with what Cyxymu was doing on an hourly basis were located within the Georgian state http://www.facebook.com/cyxymu

Also included in the attack were the chap/ette's youtube account http://www.youtube.com/user/Cyxymu and Blogger dot com http://www.blogger.com/profile/07763624860513448030

The cybernaut Cyxymu has today moved across the net to explain how an enormous amount of spam was generated using accounts bearing the Cyxymu name. So if you get a strange email offering to extend your penile length or girth in the next twenty four hours, don't be surprised. This is how these rogues, vandals and undoubtedly meat eaters operate.

Yesterday's little upset for fans of the newest generation of "social network" sites marks a curious new demonstration of the role of tweets. Before on two seperate occassions this year alone we have been invited to term political events as "tweeter revolutions", both Moldova and Iran being I believe the best examples of such nonsense and marketting. Whilst we also saw those privileged enough to enjoy such technology in Honduras take to supporting the recent coup d'etat there across not only these "new social networks" but also appearing on this very website.

(Natalia Morar, the Moldovan Twitter Revolutionary, house arrest lifted.: http://www.indymedia.ie/article/92069 )

But yesterday we saw something else : the complete disruption of these networks to the annoyance of uncounted millions of cybernauts in quite simply billions of different places - all just because of one chap/ette in Abkhazia who really seems to log on an awful lot and could probably do with getting out more and enjoying some fresh air. But then again maybe s/he operates a laptop and is basking in the Caucasian sun right now.

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astonishing thought that a vendetta against a single user caused Twitter to crumble

by -

Fri Aug 07, 2009 18:59

BBC coverage of yesterday's attack on Twitter quotes Graham Cluley of security firm Sophos who on his blog has said: "This raises the astonishing thought that a vendetta against a single user caused Twitter to crumble, forcing us to ask serious questions about the site's fragility."

Only Google seems to have escaped unscathed from the attack. "Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services," the company said in a statement. The company has not confirmed which services were targeted in the attack, but it is thought that its e-mail service Gmail and video site YouTube were under fire. "We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by [an]... attack this morning, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack," the company said.

BBC tech writer Maggie Sheils notes on her blog : Of course, it wasn't a full day that the world went without the successful microblogging service (see 'Massive attack' strikes websites). It was just a few - crippling, to some - hours. But the distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) that hobbled Twitter and its 45 million worldwide users - and which also sucked in Facebook and LiveJournal - has security experts baffled and concerned. "Up is down, left is right and black is white," I was told by Cisco fellow and chief security researcher Patrick Peterson. "These attacks do not make sense. In the last few years, we have seen the criminals build systems to make money and not get caught. "Now we see them making a big splash with this attack which is of no benefit. It does not put a single dollar in their pocket and it exposes them to the risk of being caught," said Mr Peterson.

But maybe they made people think about Abkhazia and South Ossetia?

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c/f If you want to read last year's IMC coverage of the war you can enjoy it on the now completely restored IMC UK site whose downtime earlier today had nothing to do with Georgian bloggers and has now been restored.http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/08/435815.html

"Information Links & Sources for the (short) war in South Ossetia"

part 1 August 8th to morning August 12th
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/world/2008/08/40...?c=on

part 2 - mid afternoon August 12th - 16th 2008
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/world/2008/08/40...?c=on

& if you want to read the blogger chap whose words are so hot they down the net, then put "Cyxymu" through google or just invite him or her to be your friend on Facebook and send you a sext SMS so you know if it is a him or a her.

sa you can see the national flag of Abkhazia combines celtic rangers with ulster red hand & little stars. flags need stars.

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Yesterday's outage on Facebook, Twitter etc caused by cyber attack on 1 blogger.

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