I find this hard to credit, but CBS says that yesterday’s distributed denial-of-service attacks on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, and LiveJournal were all aimed at one particular user:
The blogger, who uses the account name “Cyxymu,” (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.
“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard,” Kelly said. “We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”
Kelly declined to speculate on whether Russian nationalists were behind the attack, but said: “You have to ask who would benefit the most from doing this and think about what those people are doing and the disregard for the rest of the users and the Internet.”
Twitter was down for several hours beginning early Thursday morning, and suffered periodic slowness and time-outs throughout the day.
If it turns out that this is true, I guess it’ll be easier to start looking for the controller of the massive botnet that conducted the attacks . . . and probably has a physical presence near the Kremlin.
Update: The Guardian has more on the story.
