Twitter Denial Of Service Attack 101

A hacker attack virtually shut down Twitter Thursday morning, August 6. Twitter announced it was "defending against a denial-of-service attack"- which is when hackers command a whole army of computers to single site at once. Attacks of this sort are a common weapon employed by cyber criminals to disrupt the working of Web sites. Perpetrators enlist millions of computers to access a particular site. In response, the site cannot handle the massive increase in traffic, and is rendered inaccessible.

According to Twitter's blog update, the following alert was made available to millions of frustrated Twitter users.

• On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.

Biz Stone's tweet kind of sums up his frustration as well!



Denial of service attacks are relatively common. Earlier this week, Gawker Media sites were hit with a denial of service attack.The attack on Twitter represents the latest in a string of denial-of-service attacks against several high-profile Web sites. In early July, a number of U.S. government Web sites, as well as the Web site of the New York Stock Exchange and several South Korean Web sites, were the target of similar actions.

Twitter has no more information about the attack than what has been posted on its blog, which it will continue to update.