Hackers attempting to silence a pro-Georgian blogger may have been behind yesterday's cyber attack which affected up to 35 million worldwide users of Google, Twitter and Facebook
Twitter and Facebook suffered service problems from hacker attacks yesterday, raising speculation about a coordinated campaign against the world's most popular online social networks.
A Facebook executive said yesterday's denial of service attacks were aimed at a Georgian blogger with accounts at the various affected sites, according to a report on technology news site CNET.
Yesterday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the company preferred not to speculate about the motivation behind the malicious attack.
"Twitter has been working closely with other companies and services affected by what appears to be a single, massively coordinated attack," said Mr Stone.
Members of Facebook, the world's largest Internet social network with more than 250 million active users, saw delays logging in and posting to their online profiles. Like Twitter, Facebook said the problems appeared to stem from a so-called denial of service attack, a technique in which hackers overwhelm a website's servers with communications requests.
Google said in an emailed statement that it was in contact with some non-Google sites that were impacted by Thursday's attacks to help investigate.
"Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services," the statement said.
Motives for denial-of-service attacks range from political to rabble-rousing to extortion, with criminal groups increasingly threatening to hobble popular websites that don't pay demanded fees, according to security experts.
In July a wave of similar attacks disrupted access to several high-profile U.S. and South Korean websites, including the White House site. South Korea's spy agency said at the time that North Korea might have been behind the attacks.
Twitter's newfound fame makes it an easy target for hackers, said Steve Gibson, the president of Internet security research firm Gibson Research Corp.
The number of worldwide unique visitors to the Twitter website reached 44.5 million in June, up 15-fold year-on-year, according to comScore data.
Reuters