Security Bullet In
Communiques from the security front, sir
Thursday 6 August 2009, 6:10 PM
Twitter suffers denial of service attack
Popular micro-blogging site Twitter has suffered a denial of service attack.
The site was inaccessible from approximately 3pm BST for over an hour. The site is now back up and running, but according to a Twitter status page it is still under attack.
"We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly," said the status page.
"Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack," the page continued.
Programmer Barrett Lyon wrote in a blog post that site congestion was indicative of a denial of service attack. He said that Twitter appeared to only use one network provider (NTT), which he said was "rather insane these days", as it makes it easier to attack.
Lyon used the traceroute tool to chart the "hops" information packets take as they move through the internet. The programmer said that traffic got congested at hop six, indicating "something [was] very wrong".
Twitter was also trying Ddos mitigation techniques, said Lyon, including http redirect -- the hope being that bots wouldn't follow the redirect.
Meanwhile, Twitter's newly instituted malware filter was said to have shortcomings by researcher Dancho Danchev on Tuesday.
The site was inaccessible from approximately 3pm BST for over an hour. The site is now back up and running, but according to a Twitter status page it is still under attack.
"We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly," said the status page.
"Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack," the page continued.
Programmer Barrett Lyon wrote in a blog post that site congestion was indicative of a denial of service attack. He said that Twitter appeared to only use one network provider (NTT), which he said was "rather insane these days", as it makes it easier to attack.
Lyon used the traceroute tool to chart the "hops" information packets take as they move through the internet. The programmer said that traffic got congested at hop six, indicating "something [was] very wrong".
Twitter was also trying Ddos mitigation techniques, said Lyon, including http redirect -- the hope being that bots wouldn't follow the redirect.
Meanwhile, Twitter's newly instituted malware filter was said to have shortcomings by researcher Dancho Danchev on Tuesday.
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