Twitter DDOS, AT&T Blocks 4Chan & New TV

Well, it has been a few days, so here we go.

First.  Twitter (and Facebook and Blog.com (or Live Journal, this is the hard part to find out)) was the victim of a DDOS attack.  For those that don’t know a DDOS (denial of service) attack results in flooding a site or server with so much traffic that it cannot handle it and simple shuts down.  It looks like Twitter (and the others) were being attacked, targeting a specific user.  It seems that the attacker just wanted to take down that specific user, but ended up taking down the whole site.  Twitter was the only one to completely go down.  It was up and down starting around 6am PST on 8/6.  From a few scattered reports the attack is still causing some issues with some Web 2.0 sites.

During the initial attack Twitter was the only one to completely go down.  The other seemed to stay up, though you did have to refresh Facebook once or twice to get it to load.  This is an important note to all those web admins.  You need to not only protect yourself against a high volume of traffic, but also DDOS attacks, since they cause the same kind of problems.  And at the time of this positing, Twitter is still having issue.

AT&T and 4Chan (thus leading to the hacker group anonyms) had a small tiff in the past couple of weeks.  4Chan was the victim of an attack, then turned around and sent a large amount of traffic to AT&T servers.  AT&T, to protect themselves and their customers, ended up blocking img.4chan.org, which is the image server for the 4Chan servers.  Tom Merritt (@acedtect) has a great video on this.  See the following link: http://cnettv.cnet.com/why-blocked-4chan/9742-1_53-50075089.html.  One of these days I will get it so I can post code in here…

And on a personal note I got a new TV.  Got myself a new Samsung 50” Plasma.  Have the PN50B860.  It is nice, though it looks like I have a bum power supply in it…. *sigh*.

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