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

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.