A group of hackers from Russia are being blamed for last week’s downtime on Twitter and Facebook, and attempted outage on LiveJournal.com. Twitter, the site which bore the brunt of the attack, was brought offline by a “denial-of-service” attack when a flood of co-ordinated traffic caused servers to crash. It is thought that the attack was to silence an outspoken pro-Georgian blogger.

34 year old lecturer Georgy who uses the online blogger pseudonym of Cyxymu, regularly uses his currently offline blog to criticise the Russian government. Explaining his views he said “Maybe it was carried out by ordinary hackers but I’m certain the order came from the Russian Government. An attack on such a scale that affected three worldwide services with numerous servers could only be organised by someone with huge resources.” He added that it was “to keep his voice from being heard.”

Using a vast collection of virus infected PC’s called botnets to co-ordinate an attack, hackers can bring down entire websites within minutes. Co-founder of Twitter Biz Stone expressed that the “continuing denial-of-service attack is being mitigated, although there is still degraded service for some folks while we recover completely. Such attacks are malicious efforts to disrupt services.”

Attacks such as this are normally used to blackmail website owners into paying up to release their pages. This time however, the hackers looked to be attempting to make a political statement especially when Cyxymu’s showed he was aware of the attack against him saying “Now it’s obvious it’s a special attack against me and Georgians.”

Tagged as: Facebook, LiveJournal.com, Twitter