Twitter Returns Another New Attack

Less than a week after a denial-of-service attack brought Twitter to a standstill, the popular micro-blogging service experienced a brief outage again this week, raising speculation about the source of the latest problems.

 

On Tuesday, Twitter was down for about 30 minutes in the latest attack, a marked difference from last week’s incident, which caused the service to go down for about two hours.

 

"We're back up and analyzing the traffic data to determine the nature of this attack," Twitter officials said on the company’s status page

 

The cause of Tuesday's outage remains under investigation. The outage followed an update to the site, but officials did not say if that played a role. No further details were available.

 

The outage came five days after a widespread denial-of-service crippled Twitter and slowed access to other social networking and blogging sites for several hours. Officials said the initial hacker attacks were targeted at a Georgian blogger who uses the site.

 

The target of the initial attacks was a blogger named “Cyxymu,” an outspoken supporter who lives in the Eastern European nation of Georgia. As TMCnet reported, the blogger, who has a Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal accounts, told the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom that the cyber attack was launched to block his online comments. 
 

The attacks coincided with the one-year anniversary of the Russia-Georgian conflict.

 

The micro-blogging service lets people post updates through 140-character messages. The two-year-old site has exploded in popularity. The number of visitors to Twitter soared 83 percent in April from March, reaching 17 million, according to comScore data.

 

This is the third time in a month Twitter has been the subject of security issues and hacking. Last month, Twitter was the target of various security attacks. First, the so-called “Month of Bugs” phenomenon exposed the vulnerabilities in third-party Twitter applications and then, the Koobface worm hit the site, causing the social network to temporarily suspend any accounts it discovered spreading the worm.

 

News reports suggested that a computer hacker has gained access to confidential documents of Twitter and some of its employees, and then forwarded the material to other servers. According to the company, the attack did not compromise user accounts, except for a screenshot of one person’s Twitter page.