Hacker attacks Twitter taken offline for more than two hours and Facebook to slow
Twitter and Facebook suffered service problems from hacker attacks on Thursday, raising speculation about a coordinated campaign against the world’s most popular online social networks. The attacks left millions unable to carry out daily routines that have assumed an increasingly central part of their lives. The incidents also underscored the vulnerability of fast-growing Internet social networking sites that have been heralded as powerful new political tools to counter censorship and authoritarianism. In a blog post on Thursday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the company preferred not to speculate about the motivation of the malicious attack that knocked the site offline and made it inaccessible for several hours earlier in the day. Members of Facebook saw delays logging in and posting to their online profiles. Like Twitter, Facebook said the problems appeared to stem from a so-called denial of service attack, a technique in which hackers overwhelm a website’s servers with communications requests. Motives for denial-of-service attacks range from political to rabble-rousing to extortion, with criminal groups increasingly threatening to hobble popular websites that don’t pay demanded fees, according to security experts.
Filed Under: Breaking News • Danger
About the Author: Faysal Chowdhury, a Civil Engineer at day and an intelligent tech blogger at night. Stationed in Dhaka, Bangladesh he is has been with HotCellularPhone.com since the beginning, dated back to 2008. After receiving his Bachelor’s Degree in 2006, he started working as a Civil Engineer for Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB) but his tech savvy mind always kept up with the mobile world and keeping everyone updated as well.
