DOS Attack Yesterday

[russdev]

BBC NEWS | Technology | 'Massive attack' strikes websites

As probably heard was DDOS attack against Facebook, twitter, google and Livejournel. Graham from Sophos did make point about how attack (which seems to be focused on blogger) could cause trouble at least for twitter which took brunt of the attack by looks of it..

Russ

[Theblacksheep]

Researcher: Twitter attack targeted anti-Russian blogger ? The Register

As Twitter struggled to return to normal Wednesday evening, a trickle of details suggested that the outage that left 30 million users unable to use the micro-blogging service for several hours - at least in part - may have been the result of a spam campaign that targeted a single user who vocally supports the Republic of Georgia.

According to Bill Woodcock, research director at the non-profit Packet Clearing House, the torrent of traffic that brought the site to its knees wasn't the result of a traditional DDoS, or distributed denial of service attack, but rather people who clicked on a link in spam messages that referenced a well-known blogger called Cyxymu.

"This was not like a botnet-style DDoS," Woodcock told The Register. "This was a joejob where people were just clicking on links in email and the people clicking on the links were not malefactors. They were just the sort of idiots that click on links in email without knowing what they are."

[matt40k]

Happens all the time, surely they mean DDOS?

[jamesb]

Happens all the time, surely they mean DDOS?

Probably, but not necessarily. DDoS refers to Distributed Denial of Service, which it seems that this was. DoS is just Denial of Service, the different is the number of nodes used to perform the attack.

A DoS attack can be as simple as someone big standing between you and the computer, and holding a baseball bat.

[russdev]

Well as pointed out two theories are a ddos and joes job attack to be honest I am with Graham on this one seems unlikely that Joes Job caused the problem. Could of been both a Joes Job and a DDOS attack.

Russ

[matt40k]

Well it's sounds distributed to me, surely they should use the correct term, just like Russ should

DOS sounds like it was Company X trying to take out Company Y rather then person 1, 2, 3 taking out Company A

[russdev]

Yes it happens all the time but unusual case here is to target one person. DOS attacks are often against a company or a cause. Where this attack was targeted against one person.

Russ