What Twitter outage means for you

[ronjor]

-{ Quote: "by Bob Sullivan

Thursday’s Twitter denial-of-service hack certainly grabbed everyone's attention. Nothing like a total shutdown to make people sit up and take notice. But relatively speaking, denialof-service attacks are harmless. Everyone's been through it - CNN, Yahoo, Microsoft. Heck, Facebook and LiveJournal were hit Thursday, too, by the social media bandwidth bandit. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

But Twitter's been hit by far more serious security issues in the recent past.. Just last month, a hacker wormed his way through Twitter and into personal documents of a company executive. Earlier this year, a hacker managed to impersonate several high-profile public figures (including President Barack Obama and CNN's Rick Sanchez) by hijacking their Twitter accounts. Not to mention all the spam, viruses, and malicious links that are finding their way around the microblogging site these days." }-Article. (http://redtape.msnbc.com/2009/08/the-best-way-to-get-the-attention-of-a-classroom-full-of-rowdy-kids-is-to-turn-the-lights-off-and-the-best-way-to-get-the-at.html)

[TonyW]

It means nothing to me as I don't use it. In fact, I haven't got into the whole social networking phenomenon so don't use any of these services.

[ronjor]

It is a very popular site to some users. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2343546,00.asp

[TonyW]

Oh, I appreciate it's popular as is Facebook; it's just I haven't got into the whole thing. :)

Of course, like most things on the 'net, the novelty will wear off for some people then they move onto something else.

[ronjor]

Actually, the point of the post is to give information to those that use the service. Nothing more, nothing less. :)

[dw426]

"Denial of Service attacks are harmless"...depends on who gets attacked. I wonder what it's truly going to take for people to understand these "online diaries" are the absolutely most wonderful weapons in the bad guys arsenals? Okay, done hijacking the thread :)

[ronjor]

-{ Quote: "But relatively speaking, denialof-service attacks are harmless." }-Not a good choice of wording I will agree.

[BlueZannetti]

-{ Quote: "It means nothing to me as I don't use it." }-Actually, if you dig a bit deeper, the whole episode should raise concerns IMHO.

This is about collateral damage. A very substantial user population lost access to a net based resource for an extended time (apparently) due to an attack focused on one individual.

Sure, Twitter is mainly about trivial conversation. But we've also seen where it has had an impact when immediacy was a primary need. However, ignore the specifics of the resource impacted. What does this say about the so-called cloud based initiatives? It's fairly easy to build robustness into connectivity. How do you do it for centralized resources? Is this going to cause people to rethink how they approach pushing resources from single PC's to hosted services? I have no idea, but there seems to be a note of fragility that should give one pause.

There's actually a whole lot here to think about, particularly for those hosting these services/resources.

Blue

[Keyboard_Commando]

To see social networking sites as being just being idle chitter chatter updates of joe bloggs and his mates would be wrong. They're often the mouthpiece for the rich ... famous ... the politician (Barack Obamas twitter account here (http://twitter.com/barackobama) )

If you visit Obama's Twitter account you'll notice policy updates and announcements are made there, so it carries some legitimacy of "from the horses mouth".

Imagine if Obama's official account was to be hacked AGAIN - Obama's account hacked (http://blog.twitter.com/2009/01/monday-morning-madness.html). The possibilities are endless if anyone should now get a hold of that Twitter account, Don't ya think? Though I can't believe that the security of the president's account is left in the hands of Twitter, they seem clueless and unable to combat hackers exploiting the sites popularity, at the moment.

Some Georgian guy is claiming the Dos attack on Twitter and other sites was aimed at him, due to his anti Russian stance and literature he posts on the net. Interestingly the Dos attack came on the year anniversary of the Georgian + Russian dispute - source (http://www.scmagazineuk.com/Georgian-blogger-claims-he-has-been-made-a-scapegoat-for-the-Twitter-denial-of-service-attack-as-emails-sent-claim-to-be-from-him/article/141307/)

The recent troubles in Iran highlighted the power of social networking sites. Twitter and all the others became the voice for those closed down by a repressive government. - Story (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/16/irans-twitter-revolution/)

The recent 4th of july attacks on USA & S.Korea show the average user on the internet is going to be caught in the political crossfire, IMO. Internet news sites and blogging have become of greater importance than much of tv reporting. Clearly free speach and the truth is at risk if a rogue government can dos down a site it doesn't like. The news and truth is at risk.

It's not just the phishing scams (http://blog.twitter.com/2009/01/gone-phishing.html) you need to be wary of when you are visiting Twitter and the like.